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BEEKELEY 



CONTENTS. 



PAET I.— 1685-1713. 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. EARLY LIFE IN IRELAND, ... 1 

II. LOCKE ON IDEAS AND THEIR CAUSES, . 17 

III. VISUAL IMMATERIALISM, . . . 32 

IV. UNIVERSAL IMMATERIALISM, . . 48 
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PAET II. — 1713-34. 

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II. SOCIAL IDEALISM AND AMERICA, . . 117 

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IV. CONTROVERSIAL AUTHORSHIP, . . 142 

V. WHETHER GOD CAN BE SEEN, AND WHAT 

GOD IS, ... . 156 



viii Contents, 

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I. MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY AT CLOYNE, . 170 

II. OXFORD, . . . . .186 

III. SIRIS AND THE SUPERSENSIBLE, . . 190 

IV. SCEPTICISM — AGNOSTICISM — -GNOSTICISM — 

FAITH, . . . .213 



I 



0^ 



PREFACE. 



This volume is an attempt to present, for the first time, 
Berkeley's philosopHc thought in its organic unity. 
The thought is unfolded in connection with his per- 
sonal history, and it is compared with the results of 
later philosophical endeavours, including those of chief 
scientific and theological interest at the present day. 

Besides important new hiographical material, the 
author is fortunate in being able to present an original 
portrait of Berkeley, and one, too, from a picture taken 
at a much earlier period in his life than those hitherto 
published. It was painted when he was in Eome. The 
picture was inherited by his descendant, the late Mr 
Eobert Berkeley, Q.C., Dublin, and has been kindly lent 
to the pubKshers by his widow. It is an old oil-paint- 
ing, very difficult to copy ; but even as it is, this glimpse 
of his sanguine youth, now first presented to the world, 
may be preferred to the familiar engravings which repre- 
sent him at a more advanced age. 



BERKELEY. 



PAET L — 1685-1713. 



CHAPTEE I 

EARLY LIFE IN IRELAND. 

Towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, 
a certain William Berkeley and his wife, according to 
credible tradition, occupied a cottage attached to the 
ancient castle of Dysert, in that part of the county of 
Kilkenny which is watered by the K'ore. In this modest 
abode their philosophical son George, the eldest of six 
sons, was born, on the 12th of March 1685 (n. s.) 
Little is known about William Berkeley, except that 
he was an Irishman by birth and an Englishman by 
descent. It is said that his father (or grandfather) 
migrated from England to Ireland early in Charles's 
reign, in the suite of his kinsman the first Lord Berkeley 
of Stratton. William Berkeley's wife was probably 
Irish; but about her even so much as this cannot be 
confidently asserted. 

p. — in. a 



2 Berkeley, 

Thus ignorant of the family, one cannot, on the ground 
of known facts, refer the singular mental dispositions of 
the eldest son either to heredity or to home education. 
The parents have left no mark. We have not light 
enough now to see into this Irish family life, as it went 
on two centuries ago in that secluded region. From 
occasional glimpses of the five younger brothers, on 
their respective courses afterwards, we may infer that 
they were little able to sympathise intellectually with the 
only one among them who revealed religious and phil- 
osophical genius. The little in the early history of the 
eldest brother that can be gleaned to explain his imique 
character, must be sought for elsewhere than in the 
known facts of the family life and its antecedents. 

The ruined castle of Dysert, with the remains of the 
adjoining farmhouse, may still be seen on a grassy 
meadow on the bank of the IN^ore, about twelve miles 
below the city of Kilkenny. The occupants had within 
their view a scene well fitted to inspire a romantic boy 
with sympathy for nature and natural religion. The 
young idealist, if he was unintelligible to his family, had 
room to brood in solitude, during the latter years of the 
seventeenth century, in the fair vale through which the 
Nore descends, amidst the foliage of "Woodstock, to its 
junction with the Barrow at ^ew Eoss. " I was dis- 
trustful at eight years," he says of himself afterwards, 
" and so by nature disposed for the new doctrines." The 
imagination of the thoughtful boy, moreover, may have 
been roused not only by surrounding nature, but also by 
contemporary doings among his countrymen. The "warre 
in Ireland " was going on while he was passing from his 
fourth to his sixth year. He was about six when the 



Boyhood in Kilkenny, 3 

battle of the Boyne was fought, and was, we may fancy, 
at Dysert when James made his rapid retreat down the 
N"ore to Waterford, and William of Orange was enter- 
tained in the ancient castle of the Butlers at Kilkenny. 

A few years later we find traces of George Berkeley 
in Kilkenny school. The register records his appear- 
ance there on a day in early summer in 1696, when he 
was eleven years old. He was placed at once in the 
second class. This fact seems to mean that he was 
unusually precocious, for the school record contains 
hardly 'another instance of similar advancement. At 
this well-known school he spent about four years. Kil- 
kenny, noted for its learned masters and famous pupils, 
has been called the "Eton of Ireland." Swift as well 
as Berkeley has added to its fame. One of Berke- 
ley's school-fellows was Thomas Prior, afterwards known 
as the Irish philanthropist, his constant friend and cor- 
respondent for half a century. There is an idle tradition 
that in these school-days young Berkeley fed his imag- 
ination with the " airy visions of romance," and thus 
weakened his natural sense of the diJfference between 
illusion and reality. The myth probably had its origin 
long after, in the popular misinterpretation of his phi- 
losophy. What we have evidence of is, that his eye 
was then open to the phenomena of nature, and that he 
diligently explored what was curious among them within 
his reach. He wrote a minute and characteristic account 
of the Cave of Dunmore in the neighbourhood, founded 
on these youthful observations.^ The Kilkenny coun- 
try, as well as Dysert, was fitted to call forth the sense 
of beauty in nature. The city has been compared to 
^ See Works, vol. iv. pp. 503-511. 



4 Berkeley. 

Warwick, and Windsor, and Oxford. One who visits it 
cannot soon forget the charms of the Nore, as seen up- 
wards or downwards on an autumn day from the school 
meadow; or the mingling of buildings, new and old, 
castle, cathedral, and round tower, so happily grouped 
on the high ground, with the free and careless grace of 
nature in all the neighbouring country. 

It was out of this fair Irish vale, remote from the 
ways of men, that George Berkeley, thus dimly discern- 
ible at first, so unexpectedly emerged, in an island that 
was only beginning to take part in the inteUecttial and 
literary work going on in the world. In a few years 
more he became one of the acknowledged masters of Eng- 
lish literature, and proved himself, before he reached 
middle life, to possess the most significant philosophical 
mind then at work in Europe. 

In March 1700, Berkeley, fifteen years of age, left 
Kilkenny and the picturesque region of the JNTore, to 
matriculate at Trinity College, Dublin. This was his 
home for the next thirteen years. Of his mental his- 
tory for three or four years after his matriculation there 
is no direct record. But we are now able to trace 
the subsequent working of his mind, in the crisis of 
its development. His lately discovered " Commonplace 
Book" reveals him to us at Trinity College, in his 
twentieth year, suddenly exulting, with the impetuous 
enthusiasm of a warm imagination, in a new and revolu- 
tionary thought about the true meaning of that reality 
which we all attribute to the world that is presented to 
our senses. With this new thought he had somehow 
then and there become inspired. Under a conviction 



Trinity Collegey Dublin, 5 

of its value to mankind, he was longing to make it 
known. It was to make short work, he was certain, of 
all supposed " powers " in dead unconscious Matter ; and 
so its promulgation would relieve perplexities and con- 
tradictions, otherwise inexplicable, by which scepticism 
in religious thought had been sustained It solved for 
him the difficulties of natural science and of theology, 
in a new philosophy w^hich showed that both science 
and religion were essentially reasonable. The conclu- 
sions to which this startling inspiration gave birth, 
could not long be kept to himself. Before the thirteen 
years at Trinity College were ended, they had overflown in 
published as weU as unpublished writings. An argumen- 
tative exposition and defence of this transforming belief, 
about the real meaning of the things we see and touch, was 
thus early pressed by him upon the world, with a subtle 
and ingenious advocacy, in small successive volumes. 

The influences which turned the Kilkenny youth who 
was " distrustful at eight years " thus impetuously and 
permanently towards the metaphysics of matter, are 
worthy of investigation. Some of them, at any rate, can 
be ascertained. 

When one looks back to Dublin and its CoUege in 
the beginning of last century, new and strong intellec- 
tual forces begin to show themselves. The head of the 
College was Dr Peter Browne, already kno^vn as the 
literary antagonist of Toland the free-thinker. Toland's 
* Christianity not Mysterious ' about tliis time had raised 
a theological ferment in Dublin, which was probably 
not without effect in the end on young Berkeley. 
As a controversialist in metaphysical theology, Browne's 
name became afterwards more widely known. Long 



6 Berkeley. 

after this, wlien Eishop of Cork, he was a vigorous critic 
of Locke's philosophy, and of the nature and limits of 
our theological knowledge. Those interested in this 
may refer to his two not forgotten volumes, on the 
* Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding,' and 
on 'Divine Analogy/ The chief representative of the 
Irish Church in Dublin at the beginning of the eigh- 
teenth century, was not less eminent as a speculative 
thinker than the head of the College. The Archbishop 
of Dublin during the years in which Browne was Pro- 
vost was William King, still remembered as a philoso- 
phical theologian. The Archbishop's speculations about 
the analogical and negative nature of man's knowledge 
of God were much in harmony with those afterwards 
published by Browne. King was already known as the 
author of the treatise on the * Origin of Evil' which 
engaged the controversial pens of Bayle and Leibnitz. 
But a stronger intellectual influence than either 
Browne or King was now perceptible in Trinity Col- 
lege. Locke's ' Essay on Human Understanding,' pub- 
lished in 1690, was already famous, and in its fourth 
edition, when Berkeley came to Dublin in 1700. The 
' Essay ' had been introduced into the course of study at 
Dublin, and it has ever since been a characteristic feat- 
ure of the philosophical studies of the place. This 
early and emphatic recognition of Locke at Dublin was 
due to "William Molyneux, a man not to be forgotten, 
either on his own account, or as the friend and philo- 
sophical correspondent of Locke, during the latter years 
of the English philosopher's life. Molyneux was a 
Dublin lawyer, and a member of the Irish Parliament, 
fond of the new experimental methods of research, and 



Lockers 'Essay' and Cartesianism, 7 

above all an inquisitive and critical student of the new 
logic and philosophy.^ Locke's ^ Essay' had attracted 
him on its first appearance, and an enthusiastic eulogy 
of the book followed in 1692, in the "Dioptica iN'ova" 
of Molyneux. The eulogy led to that correspondence of 
Molyneux with the author of the 'Essay' which now 
throws so charming a light for several years upon Locke's 
recluse life at Gates in Essex, where Molyneux visited 
him in the month before his own sudden death. In this 
way the * Essay on Human Understanding ' was in the 
hands of reading men in Dublin in Berkeley's under- 
graduate days; and when Locke died in 1704, his name 
must have been familiar in Trinity College. 

But besides Locke, other strong modern philosophical 
influences had been at work. Cartesianism, with its 
resolute scrutiny of all traditional beliefs, and its dis- 
position to spiritualise the powers of matter, now 
affected the whole atmosphere of European thought. 
Descartes was thus a familiar classic in Dublin, and 
Malebranche was not unknown. Hobbes and Gas- 
sendi, representatives of the opposite tendency, had 
helped to make inquiring persons intimate with mate- 
rialistic conceptions of the universe, reviving in modern 
forms the atomism of Democritus and the ethics of 
Epicurus. Active investigations were going on regard- 
ing the laws and qualities of the things we see and 
touch, as well as amongst the principles and facts of 
the world of mind. The Eoyal Society, too, had been 
in existence for forty years, and had already diffused 
its spirit as far as the Irish capital Newton had pub- 

1 See 'Descartes,' by Professor J. P. Mahaffy, p. 79 — Blackwood's 
" Philosophical Classics." 



8 Berkeley. 

Kshed his 'Principia' a few years before Locke pub- 
lished his * Essay,' and the method of fluxions was 
struggling with the calculus of Leibnitz among the 
mathematicians of Dublin. 

Through these conspiring influences, it so happened 
that when Berkeley commenced his undergraduate course, 
he entered an atmosphere unusually charged with forces 
of reaction against the traditions and verbal logic of the 
schools, in physics as well as in metaphysics. Above 
all, however, the new methods of research recommended 
by Bacon and Descartes were taking shape in the the- 
ory of knowledge of which Locke was the European 
representative. 

Such was Dublin when Berkeley began to study there. 
The youth himself, then fresh from his native valley on 
the !N'ore, was at first a mystery to the ordinary under- 
graduate. The opinion formed of him came to be that 
he was either the greatest genius or the greatest dunce 
in the college. Those who looked at him on the sur- 
face took him for a foolish dreamer; his intimates 
thought him a miracle of intellectual subtlety and 
goodness of heart. A mild and ingenious youth, inex- 
perienced in the ways of men, he was also full of 
humorous and even eccentric inquisitiveness. Conte- 
rini, the "good uncle" of Oliver Goldsmith, and one 
of Berkeley's college friends, tells a story about him. 
They had gone together to see an execution, and young 
Berkeley returned curious about the sensations that 
accompany the process of dying. It was agreed that 
he should begin to try the experiment for himself, his 
friend relieving him before it was carried so far as to 
make a report impossible. He was accordingly tied to 



A mysterious Undergraduate. 9 

the ceiling. Losing consciousness, the appointed sig- 
nal for relief ^^as looked for in vain. He might have 
died in good earnest, for on being released he fell sense- 
less on the floor. His first words on recovery were, 
" Bless my heart, Conterini, yon have rnmpled my 
band I " There was already some undisciplined ardour 
in mental analysis, and a brave indifference to life in 
the service of knowledge. 

Through all this surrounding misunderstanding, ac- 
cording to report, he steadfastly pursued his course, full 
of simplicity and enthusiasuL We have records of 
graver employments in his college manuscripts. Early 
in 1705, he and some of his friends formed a society to 
meet weekly for promoting inquiry in the line of the 
"New Philosophy," of Eoyle and Xewton in physics, 
and of Locke in metaphysics. There is evidence that 
Locke's * Essay,' above all, was the prominent subject 
of debate and criticism at these meetings. The pro- 
motion of societies, literary and philosophical, was a 
work which through life Berkeley seemed fond of, for 
this Dublin reunion was the first of several with which 
he was connected. 

The college books record the usual steps of academical 
advance. In 1702 Berkeley was elected a Scholar; in 
1704 he passed Bachelor of Arts. He took his Master's 
degree in 1707, and in the same year was admitted to a 
junior fellowship. Erom 1707 onwards he was a college 
tutor, and Samuel Molyneux, the son of Locke's friend, 
was one of his pupils, or at least in intimate relations. 
His college duty must have been considerable, for he 
was tutor, Greek lecturer, and junior dearu Lncluding 
fees, his income was hardly fifty pounds a-year, but this, 



10 Berkeley, 

measured by oiir standard, means at least three times as 
mucli. Still, as the family resources were moderate, 
we must not suppose that in the early part of his life 
he was in easy circumstances. 

Whether or not Berkeley was intended by his family 
for the Church, and sent to Dublin with that view, 
does not appear. At any rate he soon took orders. 
He was ordained deacon in 1709 in the old College 
Chapel. There is no evidence of any objection to 
church formularies or to ecclesiastical life. For more 
than twenty years after he was ordained, an occasional 
service or sermon sums up his work in this department. 
While ardently loyal in promoting the spiritual educa- 
tion of man, for which the Church professedly exists, 
he can hardly be called ecclesiastical in the partisan 
sense ; nor can he often be charged with sacrificing the 
love of truth — his earliest and latest aspiration — to 
the spirit of the sectarian polemic. 

Berkeley had hardly emerged from undergraduate life 
when he became, in a modest way, an author. Two 
mathematical tracts in Latin, entitled 'Arithmetical and 
' Miscellanea Mathematica,' written by him three years 
before, were published anonymously in 1707. Even in 
abstract science his impetuous temperament appears, as 
well as his interest in the metaphysics of mathematics, 
and also that inclination to what is novel and eccentric, 
which is so apt to animate courageous beginners in a 
course of research. These performances help us a little 
to take his measure both as a mathematician and a stu- 
dent of books when he was hardly twenty years old. 
Their allusions to Bacon, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, 
and the 'Philosophical Transactions,' show the bent r" 



His " Commonplace Booh!' 11 

his early reading. One of these tracts is dedicated to 
young Samuel Molyneux. 

But a far fuller and more remarkable revelation of 
the state of Berkeley's mind in 1705 and the two fol- 
lowing years than can be found either in recorded an- 
ecdotes, or in rules of philosophical societies, or in 
mathematical puzzles, is that treasured for us in his 
" Commonplace Book," charged with its startling inspira- 
tion.^ On its pages he gives expression, just as they 
occurred, to rapidly forming thoughts about the meta- 
physical meaning of the things of sense, and of their 
ambient space. This must be ranked among the most 
precious records in existence of the crude, solitary struggles 
of subtle philosophical genius. It enables us to watch 
Berkeley when he was awakening into intellectual life, 
in company with Locke, and Descartes, and Malebranche. 
We find him gradually satisfying himself, as to the rea- 
sonableness of our behefs about ourselves, and nature, 
and God, by the help of a new thought which had 
occurred to him about the meaning of the word " real," 
when applied to the things of sense. We have only, he 
argued, to look at things in the light of this new con- 
ception of which he had become conscious. The artifi- 
cially induced perplexities of philosophers are then found 
to disappear, along with their metaphysical abstractions, 
which turn out to be only empty words. Through- 
out these private utteruigs of his thoughts, fresh and 

1 This college '* Commonplace Book " of queries and occasional 
thoughts in psychology, metaphysics, and ethics, was contained in 
two small quarto MS. volumes. It was discovered among the Berke- 
ley Papers in possession of Archdeacon Rose, and was first published 
in 1871, in the Clarendon Press Edition of Berkeley's Works, vol. iv. 
pp. 419-502. 



12 Berkeley, 

earnestly real, written as they arose, one finds a mind 
everywhere labouring under the consciousness of a 
new world-transforming conception, the sense of which 
gives rise to successive flashes of speculative and moral 
enthusiasm. He was burdened with a thought, through 
which things were found to be different from what 
philosophers had argued them to be, and also from 
what ordinary men had without argument taken for 
granted that they were. The intellectual transforma- 
tion was sure, he foresaw, to offend the unphilosophical. 
They naturally like to think about things as they have 
been accustomed to think about them ; they are shocked 
by a metaphysic revolution which they cannot follow, 
with its inevitable accompaniment of new meanings 
thrown into old words, and the strain of demands that 
cannot be met by ordinary consciousness untrained in 
reflection. This new metaphysical conception of the 
material world he instinctively felt must disturb those 
accustomed to live only in the outward and visible ; who 
take for an axiom that sensible outwardness and vis- 
ibility must belong to whatever is real ; and who never 
trouble themselves to ask in what the assumed reality 
of the seen and felt truly consists. So we find him in 
these curious effusions bracing himself to meet an enemy 
even in the common phrases of mankind. Despite the 
ridicule and dislike his transformed world was sure to 
encounter, amongst the many who are obliged to put 
words in the place of thoughts, he resolved to deliver 
himself of his intellectual burden through a book, but 
with the politic conciliation of an ingenious advocate. 

Here are a few of the many characteristic sentences in 
the " Commonplace Eook : " — 



A World-transforming Conception, 13 

" The reverse of tlie [new] Principle I take to be the chief 
source of all that scepticism and folly, all those contradictory 
and inexplicable puzzling absurdities, that have in all ages 
been a reproach to human reason. I know there is a mighty 
sect of men who will oppose me. I am young, I am an up- 
start, I am vain, 'twill be said. Very well. I will endeavour 
patiently to bear up under the most lessening, vilifying ap- 
pellations the pride and rage of man can devise. But one 
thing I know I am not guilty of — I do not pin my faith as 
the slave of any great man. I act not out of prejudice or 
prepossession. I do not adhere to any opinion because it is 
an old one, or a revived one, or a fashionable one, or one 
that I have spent much time in the study and cultivation of. 
If in some things I differ from a philosopher that I profess 
to admire [e.g., Locke], it is for that very thing on account 
of which I admire him — namely, the love of truth. . . . 
From my childhood I had an unaccountable turn of thought 
that way. . . . But he that would bring another to his 
own opinion must seem to harmonise with him at first, and 
humour him in his way of talking." 

He sees one great bar to the popular acceptance of his 
new, world-transforming thought. It is concealed by 
"the mist and veil of words." The abstractions "which 
were abstractions of verbal metaphysics at first, but 
which are now mixed up with ordinary language, had to 
be cleared away from his own mind before he could see 
the light himself ; and must be removed from the minds 
of others before he could get them to see it too. 

" The chief thing I do, or pretend to do, is only to remove 
the mist and veil of words. This it is that has occasioned 
ignorance and confusion. This has ruined the schoolmen 
and mathematicians, the lawyers and divines. If men would 
lay aside words in thinking, 'tis impossible they should ever 
mistake, save only in matters of fact." 



14 Berkeley, 

He then recognises with joy the mentally-transformed 
world that arose in his new philosophical consciousness. 

" My speculations," he finds, " have had the same effect 
upon me as visiting foreign countries. In the end I return 
where I was before ; get my heart at ease, and enjoy myself 
with more satisfaction. The philosophers lose their [abstract] 
matter ; the mathematicians lose their [abstract] extension ; 
the profane lose their extended deity. Pray what do the 
rest of mankind lose ? " 

All this wonderful intellectual transformation was, it 
seems, brought about simply by a recognition of the fact 
that things are ideas or phenomena, and that the truest 
way of looking at the world we see and touch, is when 
it is looked at as ideal or phenomenal only. 

" The philosophers talk much of a distinction between 
absolute and relative things — i.e.^ things considered in their 
own nature, and the same things considered in respect to us. 
I know not what they mean by [sensible] things considered 
in themselves. This is nonsense — jargon. Thing and idea 
are words of much about the same extent and meaning. By 
idea I mean any sensible or imaginable thing. A thing not 
perceived is a contradiction. Existence is not conceivable 
without perception and volition. I only declare the mean- 
ing of the word, as far as I can comprehend it. Existence is 
perceiving and willing, or else being perceived and willed. 
Existence is not intelligible without perception and volition 
— not distinguishable therefrom. All things are ideas." 

Berkeley, charged with thoughts like these, issued 
from what he calls an "obscure corner" to become a 
leader in European philosophy. The governing concep- 
tion of his philosophical life was unintelligible to his 
contemporaries and immediate successors; and he had 
only an imperfect consciousness of it himself. His place 



Discovery qf Mamtscripts. 15 

in the history of thought should be better understood 
now, in the light of the intervening period. We should 
be more able than our predecessors to determine whether 
one who sought with characteristic ardour to restore 
spiritual beliefs and high ideals of life in a materialistic 
age, by new principles of philosophy, was really, against 
his own intention, opening a door for the most thorough- 
going scepticism and agnosticism ever offered to the 
world. 

Within the last ten years materials for a just estimate 
of Berkeley and his philosophical conception of the uni- 
verse have accumulated. They are of various kinds : — 

(1) The Berkeley Papers, in possession of the family of 
the late Archdeacon Eose. These include (a) Berkeley's 
" Commonplace Book ; " {h) four small manuscript vol- 
umes containing a journal of his travels in Italy ; (c) a 
mass of correspondence addressed to him, along with 
some letters written by him. All that is important in 
these Papers was published for the first time in 1871, 
in the Clarendon Press Edition of Berkeley's Works. ^ 

(2) About eighty letters from Berkeley to Sir John 

1 ^ The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, 
including many of his Writings hitherto unpublished. With Pre- 
faces, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an Account of his Phil- 
osophy.' By Alexander Campbell Fraser, Professor of Logic and 
Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. 4 vols. Oxford : At 
the Clarendon Press : 1871. — ^Also, ^Selections from Berkeley.* By 
the Same. Second Edition. Oxford, 1879. 

In the merely narrative parts of this volume, I have of course occa- 
sionally drawn upon my own Memoir of Berkeley, in the Clarendon 
Press Edition ; but I have not thought it necessary to note the refer- 
ence in each case. The reader is referred for full details of the exter- 
nal facts of the life, as then known to me, to that work, to which 
this is, in that respect, auxiliary and supplementary. 



16 Berkeley, 

Percival, afterwards Earl of Egmont, from 1709 to 
1730, not hitherto published. Some account of them is 
given in the Seventh Eeport of the Koyal Commission 
on Historical Manuscripts (1879).^ Through the kind- 
ness of Lord Egmont, I am happily able, in the follow- 
ing chapters, to avail myself of this valuable collection, 
and to present portions of hitherto unpublished letters 
of Berkeley that are of biographical and philosophical 
interest (3) The numerous criticisms of Berkeley and 
his philosophy which have appeared in this country, and 
also in Germany, Holland, Erance, and America, since 
the publication of the Clarendon Press Edition of his 
works, by eminent contemporary thinkers — including 
among others, Mr J. S. Mill, Dean Mansel, Professor 
Huxley, Dr Hutcheson Stirling, Mr Arthur Balfour, 
Professor Green, Professor Caird, Professor Adamson, 
Mr Collyns Simon, Professor Ueberweg, Professor Van 
der Wyek, M. Penjon, Dr M*Cosh, and Professor EJrauth 
of Philadelphia. 

In this volume Berkeley's thought, newly interpreted, 
is used as a help towards the best thought available 
amidst our present philosophical or theological difficul- 
ties. The result may be found in the last chapter, read 
carefully in the light of the preceding ones. 

1 I am indebted for the reference to the Kev. Mark Pattison. 



17 



CHAPTEE 11. 

LOCKE ON IDEAS AND THEIR CAUSES. 

We have sometliing more distinct than the almost 
colourless picture of Berkeley's external life in his early- 
years, when we turn to the spiritual world of his birth as 
a philosopher, and the early years of his mental growth 
in it. For we have then, for the most part, to look into 
Locke's ' Essay,' and at the same time to remember the 
Cartesian atmosphere in which Locke as well as Berkeley 
lived. Berkeley's immediate starting-point was, without 
doubt, in Locke. It is true that in one of the earliest of 
the hitherto unpublished letters to Sir John Percival, 
written at Trinity College in 1709, he refers with ad- 
miration to Plato, to the delight with which he read 
the " Phsedo " and other dialogues years before, and to 
the harmony of the Platonic spirit with " the perfection 
and badge of Christianity, which is its generous con- 
tempt for the things of this sentient life." ^ Some of the 

1 In anotlier letter to Percival, written soon after this from Dublin, 
he says: *'I must own this corner furnishes scarce anything that 
deserves to be commemorated. We Irish are a nation in its nonage, 
put under the guardianship of a people that do everything for us, 
and leave us the liberty of transacting nothing material for ourselves, 
or having any part in the affairs of Europe." 

P. — III. B 



18 Berkeley, 

spirit of Plato may be discovered even in Berkeley's 
early writings, more latent, however, than it became 
long afterwards. But external and internal evidence 
combine to show that it was Locke more than any other 
who put him into the mental attitude in which we 
find him when he was at Trinity College. It is true 
that he then showed more of a spirit of antagonism to 
the doctrines of the ' Essay ' than of submissive disciple- 
ship. Still, to account for what he had become, we 
must rethink the chief thoughts of Locke, and see the 
ultimate problems at the point of view of the 'Essay 
on Human Understanding.' 

The distinctive word with Locke is "idea." The 
* Essay ' is a philosophical treatise on ideas and their 
causes. But we must note the wide meaning that 
" idea " has when Locke uses it, as he does so often 
on almost every page of his book. It is not with 
him, as in ordinary English now, a synonym for the 
internal thoughts or fancies of the mind ; nor, as in 
Platonic usage, for the objective archetypes or exemplars 
according to which the universe is constituted. What- 
ever we apprehend — whether it be a real phenomenon, 
mental or material, or a mere image in the phantasy, 
and whether we are conscious of it intuitively or sym- 
bolically — in all these phases, what is apprehended is 
generically called by Locke an idea. When I am con- 
scious of a pleasant or of a disagreeable smell or sound 
— when I see the sun or touch a tree — when I remem- 
ber any of these — when I form a mental picture of a 
centaur — when I understand scientifically the meaning 
of " circle," " planet," " wisdom," or any other common 



What Zocke means hy ''idea,'' 19 

or abstract term, — in all these cases Locke would say that 
I am having ideas. This is the meaning of the word 
idea, to which Descartes had given currency in the 
seventeenth century, and which Locke for a long time 
established in England. 

Other terms have been used, before and since, to 
express this delicate and comprehensive meaning. Phil- 
osophy, as the theory of knowledge, always needs some 
distinctive word to express the essential dependence of 
what is known on the power of knowing. " Idea " was 
used for this purpose in the seventeenth century ; some- 
times with "perception," and afterwards, in Hume, 
with "impression," as, in whole or part, synonymous. 
Mind was supposed to be manifested in being conscious 
of ideas or perceptions or impressions ; and the scientific 
study of mind was a study of the ideas or perceptions or 
impressions with which it is concerned. To investigate 
these was to investigate mind. It is nowadays more 
common to use the word " phenomenon " for this pur- 
pose, and to speak of the phenomena — that is, the 
appearances or aspects of existence of which we are 
conscious in the course of our lives — rather than of the 
ideas or perceptions or impressions which make the 
materials of this experience. The terms "sensation" 
or "feeling," though subjective, and more conveniently 
limited to a species of mental state, have been em- 
ployed by some psychologists in the same comprehensive 
universality. At present a favourite term for the pur- 
pose is "consciousness" — "fact or state of conscious 
ness." What Locke and his contemporaries called 
" ideas " or " perceptions," we, looking a them in 
their relation to the knowing mind, call " conscious- 



20 Berkeley. 

nesses," "states," or "modes" of consciousness. But 
whatever the term chosen may be — " idea," " per- 
ception," " phenomenon," " impression," " sensation," 
" feeling," or " consciousness " — it must, in virtue of 
its function, be often met with in the writings of the 
philosopher by whom it is adopted. For all terms so 
used involve the fundamental assumption of philosophy 
— that real things, as well as imaginary things, what- 
ever their absolute existence may involve, can exist for 
us only through becoming involved in what we men- 
tally experience in the course of our self-conscious lives. 
They imply that it must be only in, and as, phenomena 
of which we are percipient, that the things of sense can 
become for us more than blank abstract negations. 

The adoption of the mental attitude thus presupposed 
in all philosophy, which the term "idea" expresses for 
Locke, is the first and indispensable philosophical lesson. 
It is a hard lesson to learn, and most of us never learn it at 
all. Most men, living without reflection, take for granted 
that things would be exactly what they are now felt and 
perceived to be, although no persons in the universe ex- 
isted to perceive or be conscious of them : they even call 
this assumption a dictate of common-sense. But philo- 
sophy is the discovery that a thing receives a part, if not 
all, of what it seems to be composed of — part, if not all, 
of all its phenomenal existence — in becoming the ohject 
of a sentient, percipient, imagining mind. So that a 
word is wanted to express this mental transformation 
of the things of sense — unreflectingly supposed to be 
independent of our feelings and thoughts — into the 
conscious experience of individual persons. 

" Ideas," " perceptions," " feelings," " sensations," 



Ideas of Sense mean Phenomena of Sense. 21 

" impressions," " modes " or " states "of '' conscious- 
ness " — in a word, " phenomena " — are none of them un- 
exceptionable terms when so used. Idea is notoriously 
ambiguous, for it is apt to take its Platonic meaning in 
the mind of a philosopher, and its popular meaning in 
the ordinary unphilosophical mind. " Perception," not 
to speak of other objections, is now commonly confined to 
sense-consciousness. "Feeling" more readily connotes 
either the mere irrelative data of touch, or the senses 
generally — in distinction from developed perception, or 
else those complex states of consciousness called emotions. 
" Consciousness " is apt to suggest our private conscious- 
ness in its internal perceptions only. A "conscious- 
ness " of what is objective or external, is foreign to the 
ordinary signification of the word, and is thus apt to be 
dropt out of its meaning even in philosophical discus- 
sions. — On the whole, with Berkeley himself, in his 
later writings, I shall translate his idea of sense into 
phenomenon of sense, in explaining his theory of the 
material world. ^ 

So it came to pass that "idea," throughout the * Essay 
on Human Understanding,' was a recurring memorandum 
of the truth that, till external things were looked at on the 
side at which they could be considered part of the present- 
ative and representative experience of a conscious per- 
son, they did not enter at all into the proper problems of 
the philosopher. The " qualities " of all real, as well of 
all imaginary, things, must exist in a state of dependence 
on a sentient intelligence, in order that the words used 
about them may have any meaning. What are pains 

1 One should speak of the phenomenalism rather than of the idealism 
(ideaism, one might call it) of Berkeley— in this meaning of "idea." 



22 Berkeley, 

and pleasures, heat and cold, tastes and smells, sounds 
and colours, in a dead unconscious universe, empty of 
all rational and even sentient persons % As light virtu- 
ally creates colour, so the sensations and thoughts of a 
person at least help to create the things that person feels 
and knows. " Help to create " was all that Locke im- 
plied ; for he, at any rate, was not prepared to dissolve 
extension with the primary or mathematical qualities 
of matter, in sentiency and cognition, nor to look at 
atoms and their motions exclusively on the ideal or 
phenomenal side, as he looked at heat and cold, taste 
and smell, sound and colour. 

The philosophical point of view suggested by the 
words *' idea " or " phenomenon " is thus at the opposite 
extreme to that of materialism. It assumes that body 
can make no appearance apart from the conscious life of 
mind, in which alone things can be realised. The mate- 
rialist, on the other hand, supposes that there can be no 
knowledge of mind apart from body ; on the ground of 
the observed correspondence between what goes on in 
consciousness and what goes on in the brain and nerves ; 
and infers that our ideas — the phenomena of which we 
are conscious — are ultimately and absolutely dependent 
on the qualities and molecular motions of nerve-tissues. 
This inference Locke disavows ; but he professedly ex- 
cludes questions about the dependence of our conscious 
acts and states on organism, in our embodied conscious- 
ness, in his desire to concentrate regard upon "ideas" 
or "phenomena." 

This use of idea, phenomenon, or any other single 
term, to express at once objective sense-perceptions and 
the subjective thoughts or fancies which belong only to 



What causes ideas ? 23 

the privacy of individual consciousness, is inconveni- 
ent, on account of the confusion it is apt to produce 
between our original presentative experience in the ex- 
ternal senses, and the merely representative and often 
illusory mental states to which " idea " is popularly re- 
stricted. Locke overlooked this, in his wish to keep be- 
fore his reader the part played by sentient if not also by 
rational consciousness, in giving actuality to what could 
otherwise be only abstract and negative. So he did not 
scruple sometimes to call real things ideas, thereby mean- 
ing real things viewed as mentally transformed in 
becoming perceptions, instead of abstract entities in 
nature. But we require in consequence always to re- 
mind ourselves, in reading his * Essay,' of the distinc- 
tion, which he only obscurely presents, between those 
ideas that are commonly called real sensible things, and 
those merely private or personal ideas that form the 
stream of inward thoughts and fancies, tinder laws of 
association, in each individual consciousness. 

In thus expressing the necessary dependence of what- 
ever is known on the sensations and thoughts of some 
person who knows, the term idea presents only one 
side of what Locke taught about human knowledge 
and belief. Looked at on the other side, ideas are 
manifestations or effects — ^Locke took for granted — of 
powers and permanent beings, substantially different from 
the persons who are percipient of the ideas. Thus they 
are at once phenomena of which persons are percipient, 
and they also represent qualities which exist external to 
our individual conscious life : they are " effects in us," 
produced by substantial powers that are independent 



24 Berkeley. 

of us. Through the ideas or phenomena in which ex- 
istence shows itself, we find ourselves, he reported, in 
conflict and collision with " something " that is foreign 
to us and our ideas. 

Locke's 'Essay' is concerned, accordingly, with two 
problems. In one part of it, the ideal or phenomenal 
side of things is kept in view. There our ideas — the 
phenomena with which we are concerned — are described 
and arranged ; their dependence on words, and the de- 
pendence of words on them, is enforced. In the other 
part, he unfolds and applies the relations under which 
real knowledge and probable beliefs as to what transcends 
our individual ideas, are constituted and unfolded. The 
Second and Third Eooks of the ' Essay ' are mostly con- 
cerned with ideas or phenomena; the Fourth Book 
treats of the constitution and certainty of the "know- 
ledge" and "beliefs" we form out of the ideas or 
phenomena of which we are conscious, — especially our 
knowledge of God, and of things and persons external 
to ourselves. He explains the reasonableness or reality 
of affirmations we make about the Supreme Power in 
the universe ; and also about the forces of nature, and 
the wills of our fellow-men, that encompass and aff'ect 
us continually in so many ways. 

A far-reaching assumption runs through Locke's treat- 
ment of this second question. In dealing, in the Second 
Book of the 'Essay,' with the problem of knowledge, in 
its first aspect, he had taken for granted that things, 
whatever else they may be, must, so far as we are con- 
cerned with them, be at least ideas or phenomena of 
which we are conscious. In the Fourth Book, in ex- 
plaining how the phenomena of which we are conscious 



Intellectual Necessity for Eternal Mind. 25 

yield real knowledge, he quietly takes for granted the 
principle of causality, and its adequacy to carry us from 
the phenomenal to the unphenomenal or transcendent. 
He does not, like Kant, try to justify this principle by 
arguments, as a necessary constituent in a rational 
experience. He simply assumes it, as a truth that is 
proceeded upon by all sane men, whether they have 
ever reflected about it or not. His account of the ex- 
ternal powers which we, and the phenomena we are 
conscious of, presuppose, is his logical application of the 
principle of causality as a metaphysical dogma. 

By one application of the causal principle, Locke 
finds intellectual necessity for Eternal Mind, as the only 
intelligible cause of his own beginning to exist, as a 
self-conscious individual, nearly sixty years before the 
* Essay ' was given to the world. This implies that he 
believes in his own existence, which his ideas pre- 
suppose, and of which, like Descartes, he declares that 
he has thus an "intuitive knowledge."^ — By another 

1 See * Essay,' B. IV. ch. ix., x. The tentli chapter attracted much 
attention in Locke's own generation. Curiously, in consequence, 
he was actually accused of Spinozism. Nowadays it is the fashion 
to contrast what is called his "individualism" with the "univer- 
salism" of the Dutch metaphysician. The charge of Spinozism 
was alleged in a forgotten * Dissertation upon the First ChajDter 
of the Fourth Book of Mr Locke's " Essay;" wherein the author's 
endeavours to establish Spinoza's atheistic hypothesis are discovered 
and confuted.' By William Carroll (London, 1706). — Locke is charged 
by Carroll with giving " the holy name of God to the eternal exist- 
ence of cogitation and extended material substance, differently modi- 
fied in the whole world — i.e., maintaining the eternal existence of 
the whole world itself, all by an ingenious abuse of words ; " and 
this is argued at great length throughout the book. The first Lord 
Shaftesbury is said to have referred on his deathbed to the same 
chapter (then unpublished) as the source of his own theological 
heterodoxy. 



26 Berkeley, 

application of the same principle of cansality, lie 
found himself under an intellectual necessity (or some- 
thing like it) for believing that extended and solid 
substances are the immediate causes of the ideas or 
phenomena he was conscious of in touching, seeing, 
hearing, smelling, tasting, moving, and in experiencing 
the pleasures and pains involved in having bodily sensa- 
tions. The existence of God he had argued for, on the 
ground of the mental need for a cause which we feel in 
view of the bare fact of the commencement of our own 
existence. Knowledge of the real existence of " other 
things or powers besides God, external to what we call 
ourselves," Locke did not find — as he did that of God 
— in the bare fact of our once having begun to be 
conscious of ideas. The external world of matter 
is discovered, he thinks, only in and through those 
particular sorts of mental experience in which "other 
things, by actual operation upon our senses, make them- 
selves perceived by us." "The mere having an idea of 
any outward thing no more proves the real outwardness 
of that thing than the picture of a man proves his real 
existence, or than the visions of a dream make it a true 
history." It is only "the actual recewhig oi ideas of 
se7isG from without that gives us notice of the existence 
of external things, and makes us know that something 
doth exist, at that time without us, which causeth that 
idea in us, though perhaps we neither know nor consider 
how it does it. It takes not from the certainty of our 
senses, and the ideas we receive by them, that we know 
not the manner in which they are produced."^ 

Locke, in short, announced that he found himself, 
1 See * Essay,' B. IV. ch. xi. 



'* Matter causes the Ideas of Sensed 27 

when receiving phenomena through the five senses, 
and then only, percipient of ideas or phenomena, which 
had this remarkable characteristic, that they appeared 
and disappeared independently of his own will, while 
they all presupposed his own conscious existence. The 
principle of causality, by him unexplained, yielded the 
conclusion, that as he himself existed. Eternal Mind 
must also exist. The dependent character of the pheno- 
mena whose appearance and disappearance he was con- 
scious in his five senses, seemed to him, on the same 
causal dogma, to imply the present existence of finite 
substances and powers, extended and solid, the ex- 
ternal causes of the (by us) uncontrollable phenomena 
of sense; and to be the basis of our habitual beliefs 
in their orderly, and therefore interpretable, connection 
with one another. The Ego, God, and Matter, are thus 
the three related realities of human knowledge, of which 
Lockers ' Essay on Human Understanding ' was a pro- 
fessed explanation. 

Throughout the 'Essay,' Locke is fonder of dealing 
with the question of how our ideas and knowledge have 
become what we now find them, than with the other 
question of what they now are, irrespectively of the 
processes through which they have become what they 
are. Yet it is surely as they are now, and not as they 
were in infancy, that we must reason from them. 
Indeed philosophers of all schools have to proceed in 
their reasonings from the point of view to which they 
have attained when they philosophise, and not from the 
point of view of the jprimum cognitum in the previously 
undeveloped infant. 



28 Berkeley. 

Locke, moreover, supposes a human experience which 
begins in a consciousness of relationless ideas or phe- 
nomena, of various sorts, admitted through the five 
senses. He never dreams either of an original perception 
of individual things, like Eeid, or of a necessary consti- 
tution of phenomenal experience, like Kant. He speaks 
as if all of us at first saw colours per se, heard sounds 
per se, were conscious of smells and odours per se, or 
had sensations of heat and of cold per se; and as if 
afterwards, by some unexplained mental process, we 
learned to combine those different sorts of isolated sense 
phenomena into the aggregates or "complex ideas" 
commonly called individual things or individual sub- 
stances. The possibility of our perceptions of sense 
presenting necessarily, and therefore from the first, phe- 
nomena in complexity and in conjunction, as individual 
things, seems never to occur to him. A student of the 
' Essay ' is accustomed by it to suppose that human 
beings consciously advance from the phenomenally 
simple and isolated to the phenomenally complex and 
connected, in the growth of their real experience — 
that they were in the beginning conscious only irrela- 
tively of the phenomena of which individual things 
now seem to consist ; — instead of conversely proceeding 
by abstraction, from compound things already given, to 
separable qualities, of which sensible things are found, 
by analysis, to be made up. The question whether 
there may not be certain laws, in the very constitution 
of intellect and experience as such, which require com- 
plexity and connection in order to any intelligent con- 
sciousness at all, — that is, in order to any perception 
even of sense-given phenomena, — was foreign to Locke's 



Can we he conscioits of " Simple Ideas " ? 29 

way of thinking. He wrote as if an idea or pheno- 
menon per se was a possible perception ; as if there was 
no occasion to inquire whether the " complexity " in- 
volved in a phenomenon being regarded as virtually the 
"quality" of a "thing," might not even be necessarily 
included in perception. Why phenomena are signifi- 
cant of one another, and thus interpretable, and how 
they become aggregated as qualities of individual things, 
were questions which afterwards occurred to Berkeley, 
Hume, and Kant. 

The two problems of Locke — his classification of the 
ideas or phenomena of which we are conscious, and his 
account of the causes of this self-conscious experience — 
gave Berkeley his intellectual starting-point. He had 
been accustomed by Locke, in the first place, to regard 
all that exists on its phenomenal or ideal side ; and, at 
least in the " secondary qualities " of matter, to regard 
only this ideal or phenomenal existence. Li this con- 
nection, too, he had been taught to demand an idea for 
every term he made use of, and to reject as jargon terms 
whose meanings could not be realised phenomenally ; and 
he had also been told that some ideas are "abstract" 
— science and philosophy being concerned only with 
those supposed "abstract ideas." — But he had been in- 
vited, in the second place, to assert, with Descartes, his 
intuitive knowledge of his own conscious existence. 
Then, proceeding, without question, upon the validity of 
the dogma of causality, he had been led to demonstrate 
from his own conscious existence that of Eternal Mind ; 
and to infer from the present existence of the ideas or 
phenomena of his five senses, the present existence of 
extended and solid substances and powers. Locke, be- 



30 Berkeley, 

sides, had throughout the 'Essay' taught Berkeley to 
refer all the phenomenal data of human knowledge about 
anything, to phenomena given in sensation and reflec- 
tion. He had not taught him to inquire into the neces- 
sary constitution of reason ; or into the nature of those 
judgments of common sense, or common consciousness, 
which he nevertheless used for the transformation of 
otherwise irrelative ideas or phenomena into the real 
knowledge and warrantable beliefs that make up our 
intelligible experience. 

Taking this departure horn Locke, Berkeley's own 
mental history till his death presents three stages of 
progress. Trinity College, Dublin, was the scene of the 
First — with its literary outcome in his juvenile, which 
are also his most celebrated, philosophical treatises. The 
Second was reached when he was for the most part out 
of Ireland, in England, France, Italy, and America; 
it closes with another instalment of works in philosophy. 
For the Third, we are carried back to Ireland ; it too, 
like the preceding ones, makes its own characteristic 
contribution to metaphysical literature. Each period in 
the life is a stage in the development of the philosophy, 
which attains its most comprehensive form in the last 
period. 

The four following chapters deal with the results of 
Berkeley's intellectual labour in the first of these pe- 
riods, during which he lived at Trinity CoUege, Dublin, 
in circumstances which have already been described. 

The pervading teaching of the whole life was, we 
shall find, — that the things we see and touch are only 
superficial shows, which themselves disappear in re- 



The Pervading Conception, 31 

vealing the Eternal Spirit or Universal Eeason wherein 
we live and have our being ; and that we become con- 
scious of this, intellectually in philosophy, and practi- 
cally through assimilation to God. The more nega- 
tive part of this great lesson is what is prominent in the 
first period of Berkeley's history, and in his juvenile 
works ; his later thoughts and writings become fuller of 
the Spirit or Universal Eeason within, in the presence 
of which the sensible world seems to dissolve, and 
earthly objects vanish away. 



32 



CHAPTEE III. 



VISUAL IMMATEKIALISM. 



Berkeley soon began to make known to the world the 
intellectual secret about Matter to which an independent 
critical study of Locke's famous ' Essay '. had helped to 
lead him. But he did not fully announce at .once the 
startling change in the common way of thinking about 
the things of sense in which the secret consisted. 
He unfolded it by degrees. In 1709, when he was 
twenty-four years of age, he produced a part of it, in 
the form of an explanation of what is really meant by 
*' seeing a thing," or an 'Essay towards a J^ew Theory 
of Vision.' This ' Essay,' dedicated to Sir John Percival, 
was his first step. It is an argument for the phenomenal, 
and therefore mind-dependent, nature of the material 
world, as far as our power of seeing the things of which it 
consists can carry us into knowledge of its nature ; but it 
does not prejudge the further question of what the things 
of sense may turn out to be in the sense perceptions of 
touch and locomotion. Its conclusion is — that all ordin- 
ary seeing is really foreseeing, — that the " sight " of tan- 
gible things is the expectation, produced by habit, of ex- 
periencing unDerceived phenomena of touch and muscular 



Problem regarding Sight proposed hy Molyneux. 33 

movement, on occasion of the ideas or phenomena of 
which alone we are actually conscious when we see, but 
which thus become signs of the former. By implica- 
tion, indeed, it is an analysis of expectations in general 
into habits that are unconsciously rational. 

Some sentences which Locke introduced into the 
second edition of his 'Essay,' on the suggestion of his 
friend Molyneux, probably helped to draw Berkeley 
into this path of approach to his own new philosophical 
account of the ultimate nature of the material world. 
The passage is worth study. It is meant to illustrate 
the unconscious presence of judgments of "suggestion" 
in what seem to be simple intuitions of sight. 

"The ideas we receive by sensation," Locke says,i "are 
often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without 
our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a 
round globe of any uniform colour, — e.g., gold, alabaster, or jet, 
it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted on our minds 
[i.e., the phenomenon of which we become immediately con- 
scious] is of a fiat circle, variously shadowed, with several 
degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we 
have, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of ap- 
pearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what altera- 
tions are made in the reflections of light by the differences 
in the sensible figures of bodies ; and the judgment presently 
— by an habitual custom — alters the appearances into their 
causes, so that, from that which is truly variety of shadow or 
colour, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of 
figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure, 
and an uniform colour, when the idea we receive from hence 
[the phenomenon of which we are thence visually conscious] 
is only a plane, variously coloured, as is evident in painting. 



y/ B. II. ch. ix. § 8. 
P. — III. 



34 Berkeley, 

To wliicli purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very 
ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the 
learned and worthy Mr Molyneux, which he was pleased to 
send me in a letter some months since, and it is this : — * Sup- 
pose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch 
to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, 
and nearly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt the 
one and the other, which is the cube and which the sphere. 
Suppose then the cube and the sphere placed on a table, and 
the blind man made to see: qucere, whether by his sights 
before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell 
which is the globe, which the cube.' — To which the acute and 
judicious proposer answers. No. For though he has obtained 
experience of how a globe, how a cube, affects his touch, yet 
he has not yet obtained the experience that what affects his 
touch so and so, must affect his sight so and so ; or that a 
protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand un- 
equally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube. I 
agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to 
call my friend, in his answer to this problem ; and am of 
opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able 
with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, 
whilst he only saw them ; though he could unerringly name 
them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the 
difference of their figures felt. This I have set down and 
leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how 
much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and 
acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use 
for or help from them." 

Among Locke's readers Berkeley at any rate was 
early led into the train of thought so naturally set 
agoing by this paragraph. His " Commonplace Book " 
is full of similar problems. Here are a few examples : — 

" Qucere : Whether a man born blind, made to see, would 
at first give the name of distance to any idea intromitted by 



More ProUems regarding Sight. 35 

sight, since he would take distance that he had perceived by 
touch to be something existing without his mind, but he 
would certainly think that nothing seen was without his 
mind. . . . By extension a born blind man would mean 
either the perception caused in his mind by something he 
calls extended, or else the power of raising that perception ; 
which power is without in the things extended. Now he 
could not know either of these to be in visible things till he 
had tried. ... A blind man, at first, would not take colours 
to be without his mind ; but colours would seem to be in the 
same plane with coloured extension : therefore [coloured] 
extension would not seem to be without the mind. . . . 
Quaere, whether the sensations of sight arising from a man's 
head be liker the sensations of touch proceeding from thence 
or from his legs ; or is it only the constant and long associa- 
tion of ideas in themselves entirely different that makes us 
judge them to be the same ? What I see is only variety of 
colours and light. What I feel is hard and soft, hot or cold, 
rough or smooth. What resemblance have these thoughts 
with those ? A picture painted with great variety of colours 
yet affects the touch in one uniform manner. I cannot there- 
fore conclude that because he sees two I shall feel two ; be- 
cause I see angles or inequalities, I shall feel angles or in- 
equalities. How, therefore, can I — before experience teaches 
me — know that the visible legs are, because two, connected 
with the tangible ones ; or the visible head, because one, 
connected with the tangible head ? Writers in optics are 
often mistaken in their principle of judging of magnitudes 
and distances. . . . Length is perceivable by hearing ; length 
and breadth by sight; length, breadth, and depth by touch." 

Berkeley's ^ Essay on Vision,' after showing the kind 
and amount of knowledge afforded by our eyes alone, 
without the assistance of the other senses, proceeds to 
verify by facts the striking hypothesis — that light becomes 
a visual language, expressive of those conceptions of 
solid and resistinoj thin^^s which one born blind would 



36 Berkeley, 

derive from the experience of contact and bodily move- 
ment ; and that it is so simply because, by custom, 
persons with sound eyes have learned rapidly to trans- 
late the visual language into what would be the tactual 
conceptions of the man born blind. Our adult visible 
world is the original sense phenomena of sight uncon- 
sciously translated; the fact of the translation is dis- 
covered by psychological analysis. When an adult per- 
son, possessed of good eyes, stands in the centre of an 
extensive landscape, he seems to unreflecting common- 
sense to apprehend by sight at a glance the fields, and 
trees, and houses, and hills, and animated beings around, 
with the concave vault of heaven over all; and he is apt 
to suppose that he has been always able to do this. 
What Berkeley does in his ' Essay ' is to produce facts 
which oblige our supposed observer to modify this un- 
reflecting supposition ; since they prove to him that, 
instead of seeing the landscape and its contents " at a 
glance,'' he has really been mentally translating into 
phenomena of touch what alone he really saw, helped 
by his common -sense trust in the constant relations, 
and therefore intelligibility, of visible and tangible 
phenomena. 

The facts produced by Berkeley for verifying this 
far-reaching hypothesis are of various sorts. 

The consent of those who have studied the original 
phenomenal data of sight, since the days of Aristotle, is, 
in the first place, taken as sufficient evidence of the fact, 
that the only phenomena of which we are at first per- 
cipient in seeing are those of colour. We can simulta- 
neously see only a greater or smaller number of coloured 
ends of lines of light. Now it is certain that what is 



Berkeley's Hypothesis and its Verification. 37 

thus seen must be dependent on sentient mind. Their 
very nature makes it impossible that colours, as seen, 
could exist after the annihilation of all sentient mind. 
Colours, then, are only ideas or phenomena; so that 
ideas or phenomena are really all, properly speaking, 
that we can see. It is true, as we find when we exa- 
mine the organic conditions under which we are thus 
sentient of the coloured ends of lines, that visible 
phenomena are accompanied by invisible muscular sen- 
sations in the organ of sight ; but these sensations like- 
wise are only ideas or phenomena. Sights and their 
organic accompaniments, in short, are essentially mind- 
dependent phenomena. 

But this is not all. The sight of colour is the sight 
of simultaneous phenomena of finite length and breadth, 
— in other words, we see an extension that is charac- 
terised by visible length and breadth. We cannot, 
however, see depth or thickness — distance outwards in 
the line of sight — in seeing this sort of extension. The 
best optical authorities, including Molyneux, grant, 
Berkeley argues, that distance in a line straight out 
from the eye cannot be seen. For, sight presupposes 
rays of light proceeding in straight lines from the 
differently sized, shaped, and placed things of touch, 
which we seem to see in their respective places and 
sizes, at various distances from one another and from 
our bodies, in an ambient space. But all these lines of. 
light fall endways and not sideways upon the retina ; so 
that it can be only the end, and not the depth outwards, 
of each line that is seen. Distance, accordingly — that is 
to say, a visible interval between the visible end of the 
line and its other extremity — cannot be seen. The lines 



38 Berkeley, 

themselves cannot be seen, only their inner extremities ; 
and thus the "outness" of extension is invisible, and 
must be discovered by some other means than sight 
proper. 

Further : '^o mathematical or a priori demonstration 
of the existence of this third dimension of space can be 
drawn from the coloured extension we see, and the 
organic phenomena that accompany vision proper, re- 
garded as data and premises. For, the phenomena pre- 
sented to sight, with which alone seeing per se has 
to do, have no necessary or rational connection with 
the depth or outness of space ; nor, of course, with the 
sizes or quantities of the three-dimensioned space occu- 
pied by solid things ; nor with the places in that space 
which one solid thing occupies relatively to another. 
"We find all these relations only after we have had 
sufficient experience, in the senses of touch and bodily 
movement, and have compared that experience with our 
experiences of coloured expanse, which in the order of 
nature are steadily connected with the former.^ 

The mental connection between the phenomenal data 
of touch and locomotion and the phenomenal data of 
sight is established, Berkeley concludes, by what he 
variously calls "custom," "experience," "suggestion." 
Ey these terms he implies that there is at work here 
a sort of unconscious induction. This visual induction, 
like the conscious and deliberate inductions of science, 
and on the same general principle of the intelligibility 
or consistent orderliness of nature, is explicable, he would 

1 See the late Professor Ferrier's brilliant expository criticism of 
the Theory of Vision in the second volume of his * Philosophical 
Remains.' 



Unconscious Inductions, 39 

probably say, in the way that all human foresight, in- 
cluding the foresight called sight, is explicable. Visual 
" perceptions " of solid things placed in an ambient 
space are really, on this supposition, unconscious induc- 
tions. They are expectations, generated somehow in us 
and for us, before we were able, by a conscious com- 
parison of instances, to form them deliberately for our- 
selves. This suggestion or unconscious inference implies 
mind, and is produced by the rational action of a mind, 
if not of our individual mind. Reason is somehow latent 
in visible nature ; and this explains how adults are able 
to see as they now see. Visible extension itself — whether 
it be the visible room in which I am now writing, and 
its visible contents, or the starry heaven with its celestial 
furniture — is only a number of simultaneous visible 
and visual phenomena ; and these phenomena are cap- 
able of being inductively interpreted, because they are 
reasonable or orderly in their changes, and thus part of 
the intelligible natural system, of which science is the 
interpretation. 

In the presence of verifying facts such as these, Ber- 
keley argued that we must, as reasonable beings, acknow- 
ledge that what seemed a visible panorama, taken in 
by the eye at a glance, has really been formed . by cus- 
tom, through an unconscious inductive interpretation of 
what we have seen and touched. This enables us to 
foresee whenever we now see. Sight in its adult state 
has become habitual foresight : vision is now always 
prevision. So much is sight foresight, that no human 
being could now perform the experiment of seeing with- 
out also foreseeing. It is a question (though Berkeley 
does not make it one) whether an infant even has ever 



40 Berkeley, 

performed it. If an adult could now perform it, the 
ambient space, with, its supposed visible contents of solid 
things, at different distances from us, and variously sized 
and placed, would suddenly dissolve before our eyes, 
leaving only coloured extensions, along with certain 
ocular sensations of muscular resistance and movement 
which in ordinary experience receive no attention. 

The conclusion of the whole is, that our supposed 
spectator was profoundly mistaken in asserting that he 
really saw at a glance the landscape around his body. 
The bare original vision of phenomena of colour, along 
with certain organic sensations in the eye, had really 
been mentally transformed into the wonderful panorama 
that roused his sense of beauty. 

The ultimate or philosophical explanation of this 
transformation Berkeley hardly touches, or indeed re- 
cognises, in this juvenile 'Essay.' An attempt to reach 
it carries us into some deep philosophical problems. 
It involves the rationale of our conscious and uncon- 
scious expectations of natural events, and of scientific 
induction. One would have to inquire, for instance, 
whether the foresight, latent in ordinary adult seeing, 
is due (a) to unconscious psychical or cerebral processes ; 
or: (by to very rapid and therefore unremembered con- 
scious processes ; or (c) to the divine agency going on 
in all nature, in which human nature somehow shares. 
To solve such problems we must also be able to settle 
what are the necessary intellectual constituents of induc- 
tive expectation — those without which " experience," in 
any fruitful meaning of that term, would be impossible. 

These questions do not rise in Berkeley's early 'Essay 



The Booh of Vision, 41 

on Vision.' He is contented to argue that we learn by 
*' experience " to see outward distances, the nearest as 
well as the most remote. He founds this experience on 
suggestions similar to those by which, with consent of 
all, we learn to estimate the distance of things that are 
far away from us ; but he does not pursue the philo- 
sophy of suggestion itself. He is satisfied to refer it 
to custom. The argument, however, takes for granted 
that such suggestions involve elements adequate in 
reason to convert visual ideas or phenomena into visual 
signs, or 'a visual language. This visual language is 
a part of the interpretable language of external na- 
ture. The original visual phenomena become, under 
this conception, a grand procession of natural signs, 
which we have been learning to interpret ever since 
we were born, in the beautiful Book of Vision that is 
always open before us. We began to learn the lesson 
so early that all remembrances of the original process, 
and of the mental state in which we were before we 
learned it, have passed away. Our only possible visual 
experience now is a compound of the original ideas 
or phenomena of sight, interpreted, through help of 
habit, by our common - sense trust in the permanence 
of order in the connection between visual and other 
sorts of phenomena in nature. This has generated an 
assurance that we now find to be practically rational. 
We are all now led by habit to believe that the visible 
colours, and the accompanying muscular sensations of 
the eye, are reliable signs of approaching experiences 
of msuscular resistance, as well as of bodily pains and 
pleasures; so that they can in this way practically 
resjulate our actions. 



42 Berkeley. 

Eut, although Berkeley stops here, one may still ask. 
What means this universal sense - symbolism — this 
significance in the ideas or phenomena which we see ? 
On what sort of connection does it depend ] What 
causes the connection] A sufficient answer to these 
questions would carry us far, not only into the philo- 
sophy of sight but into the philosophy of the material 
world, and even into the highest philosophy of all. 

One thing that Berkeley insists much upon is, that 
when we try the mental experiment, we always find that 
the connection between the visual signs and their mean- 
ing is not one of rational necessity — that there is no 
absurdity in our supposing that the " meaning " of the 
signs might have been different from what it now is. 
We find, when we try, that the meanings can be re- 
versed in imagination. The present signs, for instance, 
of a thing being far away, might really have been made 
to mean that it is near. The signs and their meanings 
being connected in the way they now are, is, as far as 
we can discover, only the result of a constitution of 
nature that is arbitrary, that might have been diJfferent 
from what it is. What the actual connections are, can 
be found only by observation : future observation may 
conceivably show that the language of nature has been 
altered. That is to say, in our visual interpretations, as 
indeed in all interpretation of nature, we are dealing 
with " laws " which are the expressions of ever Active 
Mind, and not with the outcome of a blindly fated 
necessity. The laws of nature are, as it were, God's 
habit of acting in regulating phenomena. Though the 
laws which make visible nature interpretable are steady 
enough for the purposes of human action, we find no 



Faith in the Booh 43 

eternal rational necessity for their being what they are, 
more than we do for the spoken or written signs of 
Greek, English, or any other artificial human language 
being what they are. A different set of meanings from 
the established ones now attached to each sign would 
not create a contradiction in terms ; nor indeed con- 
tradict reason in any way that we can find. 

But if an inexorable necessity does not connect in 
nature ideas or phenomena, how do the visual pheno- 
mena become so connected in our minds that their mean- 
ings are " at a glance " suggested ? How comes it that 
true judgments about their meaning now arise in our 
minds as soon as we open our eyes? Berkeley does 
not discuss this. He would grant that it is due to the 
faith, somehow induced, in the supremacy of rational 
agency in the universe. For this is implied in the in- 
telligibility and trustworthiness of visual signs. This 
faith would give consistency to the tissue of the 'web 
we are unravelling whenever we are "seeing things." 
And to this result he approached in the end. 

"Upon the whole," he concludes, even in this juvenile 
Essay, in summing up the results of this his first speculative 
adventure in the world of the senses ^ — " upon the whole, 
I think we may fairly conclude that the proper objects of 
vision constitute a universal language of the author of 
NATURE, whereby we are instructed how to regulate our 
actions, in order to attain those things that are necessary to 
the preservation and wellbeing of our bodies, and also to 
avoid whatever may be hurtful and destructive to them. It 
is by their information that we are principally guided in all 
transactions and concerns of life. And the manner in which 



1 * Essay on Vision,' §§ 147, 148. 



44 Berkeley. 

tliey signify and mark unto us tlie objects which, are at a 
distance is the same with that of languages and signs of 
human appointment, which do not suggest the things signi- 
fied by any likeness or identity of nature, but only by an 
habitual connection that experience has made us observe be- 
tween them. Suppose one who had always continued blind 
to be told by his [seeing] guide, that after he had advanced 
so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or 
be stopped by a wall — must not this to him seem very ad- 
mirable and surprising ? He cannot conceive how it is pos- 
sible for mortals to form such predictions as these, which to 
him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophecy 
doth to others. Even those who are blessed with the visive 
faculty find therein sufficient cause of admiration. The 
wonderful art and contrivance wherewith it is adjusted to 
those ends and purposes for which it was apparently de- 
signed — the vast extent, number, and variety of objects that 
are at once, with so much ease, and quickness, and pleasure, 
suggested by it — all these afford subject for much and pleas- 
ing speculation, and may, if anything, give us some glim- 
mering analogous prenotion of things which are placed be- 
yond the certain discovery and comprehension of our present 
state." 

A modern scientific observer asks whether this beauti- 
ful hypothesis is verified by external facts, as well as by 
facts of internal consciousness. Does it appear, when 
the experiment is tried, that the visual consciousness of 
persons born blind, when first made to see, is really in 
the state supposed by this theory of adult sight being 
an interpretation of visual signs *? Is it true that before 
they have visual experience, their conceptions of exter- 
nal things are formed out of their blind experience of 
collision with otherwise unknown forces of resistance? 
The direct way, it may be thought, for finding out what 
sight per se is, would be to take a human instance of it 



The Born Blind, 45 

(if one can be got) altogether isolated from the experi- 
ence of the other senses. An experimental isolation of 
the simple data of each sense, by the method of differ- 
ence, is the logical method of science ; and it may seem 
possible to use it in cases of persons born blind, whose 
power to see has suddenly been communicated to them. 
It may therefore be asked, whether the facts which in 
such cases present themselves correspond to the hypo- 
thesis — that all actual seeing of things is really read- 
ing a prophetic book, which the reader has learned 
through custom to interpret by degrees. 

Berkeley did not busy himself in experiments of this 
kind, although he expressed interest in them. He 
argued out his conclusions from data of the common 
consciousness, diligently reflected upon. He inferred 
from this evidence what the first mental experience of 
those rescued from born-blindness would be ; he specu- 
lated, too, about the consciousness of "unbodied spirits," 
able to see, but, from their birth, destitute of the sense 
of muscular resistance and the power of corporeal move- 
ment. In a note to the second edition of the * Essay on 
Vision,' indeed, he referred with curiosity to some re- 
ported instance of one born blind who had been made 
to see, and who thus might be " supposed a proper judge 
how far some tenets laid down in several places in the 
foregoing * Essay' are agreeable to truth," — adding, "if 
any curious person hath the opportunity of making pro- 
per interrogations, I should gladly see my notions either 
amended or confirmed by experience." But his own 
testing facts were found in consciousness, and not 
by external experiments on other persons. An appeal 
to consciousness for verification of the antithesis be- 



46 Berkeley. 

tween the original data of mere sight and the original 
data of mere touch and muscular movement, — with the 
evidence — virtually given by common-sense — contained 
in the fact that we spontaneously trust the significance 
of what we see and of the organic sensations that 
accompany seeing, — seemed to him to fulfil all the con- 
ditions of proof. And indeed, the many physiologists 
and mental philosophers since Berkeley, who have tried 
to settle how we learn to see by external experiments, 
have usually illustrated the truth of Diderot's remark, 
that to interrogate one born blind, in a way fitted to 
test psychological hypotheses about sight, is an occupa- 
tion, from its difficulty, not unworthy of the united in- 
genuity of Newton and Descartes, Locke and Leibnitz. 

Even more remote from Berkeley is the endeavour of 
some German savants of this generation to explain, by 
an examination of the functions of the visual organs, 
how we get our present perception of space, and how 
we are able to distinguish between the simultaneous 
sense phenomena of sight and of touch. Whatever 
physiological interest the relative scientific speculations 
of Lotze, Helmholtz, or Wundt may possess on other 
grounds, from Berkeley's point of view, at any rate, they 
are destitute of philosophical value. Facts and investi- 
gations of the sort are of interest in a physiological or 
merely physical study of mind, which aims at determin- 
ing the terms of the dependence, under our present con- 
stitution, of states and acts of conscious life upon the 
constitution of nerve -tissues and organs. They may 
help us to read better the facts of consciousness in terms 
of the organic structure and functions. But they do 
not solve, nor even entertain, the philosophical questions 



The Book of Vision a Book of Prophecy. 47 

that are latent in the very presuppositions of physio- 
logical and all other natural science. The Book of 
Vision, whose existence Berkeley discovered, is one that 
might be possessed or used by any un embodied spirit 
whose phenomena were really significant of other phen- 
omena. The one cardinal point with him was that, as 
a fact, we find visual sense impressions daily arising in 
our conscious experience, which we also find practically 
capable of being translated; and that they thus make 
the Book of Vision, which, even though many know it 
not, we are all continually reading. The profound philo- 
sophical lessons in self-knowledge and in divine know- 
ledge involved in this were what he laboured in later 
life to unfold. But his first lesson in philosophy was, 
that when we seem at a single glance to be seeing 
the things of sense around us, in their places in an 
"ambient space," we are really interpreting our visual 
impressions, which thus make one of the Books of God, 
and a Book, too, which is in literal truth a Book of 
Prophecy. 



48 



CHAPTER IV. 



UNIVERSAL IMMATERIALISM. 



Berkeley's discovery of the Divine Book of Vision 
paved the way to his discovery of the Divine Book of 
Sense, of which the Book of Vision was only a part. 
" The bookseller who printed my ' Essay on Vision/ " 
he writes from Dublin, in March 1710, to Sir John 
Percival, then in London,^ "imagining he had printed 
too few, retarded the publication of it on that side the 
water till he had printed this second edition. I have 
made some alterations and additions in the body of the 
treatise, and in the Appendix have endeavoured to answer 
the objections of the Archbishop of Dublin. There 
still remains one objection — with regard to the useless- 
ness of that book of mine, — but in a little time I hope to 
make what is there laid down appear subservient to the 
ends of morality and religion, in a treatise I have now 
in the press, the design of which is to demonstrate the 
existence and attributes of God ; the immortality of the 
soul; the realisation of God's pre-knowledge and the 
freedom of man; and by showing the emptiness and 
falsehood of several parts of the speculative sciences, to 
1 Percival MSS. 



The Booh of Sense. 49 

reduce men to the study of religion and things useful. 
How far my endeavours will prove successful, and 
whether I have been all this time in a dream or no, 
time will show. ... I do not see," he adds, " how 
it is possible to demonstrate even the being of a God on 
the principle of the Archbishop — that strictly goodness 
and understanding can no more be assumed of God than 
that He has feet and hands; there being no argument 
that I know of for God's existence which does not prove 
Him at the same time to be an understanding, wise, and 
benevolent Being, in the strict, and literal, and proper 
meaning of these words." The book foreshadowed in 
this letter appeared in the summer of 1710, as the 
" First Part "of a ' Treatise concerning the Principles of 
Human Knowledge, wherein the chief Causes of Error 
and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the Grounds of 
Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are inquired into.' 
In this still unfinished fragment of a larger work, 
Berkeley's new view of the meaning of reality, when 
reality is affirmed of the things of sense, is explained, 
defended, and applied. It contains the germ of a 
Theory of Knowledge, which indeed was never fully 
unfolded, perhaps, even in his own thoughts. 

The ' Essay on Vision ' dealt with an artificially 
isolated world of visual ideas and phenomena. The 
' Treatise on Human Knowledge ' was an endeavour to 
show that what was true of the isolated phenomena of 
sight was also true of the whole phenomenal world of 
sense. In his explanation of the way in which we learn 
to see things, Berkeley had tried to prove that what is at 
first a chaos of unintelligible visual impressions becomes 
transformed into an interpretable and partly interpreted 

p. III. D 



50 Berkeley, 

system of visual signs, dependent in their very nature 
on a sentient mind. The same sort of transformation of 
phenomena, he now argued, takes place in our perception 
of the whole material world. For, by analysis, all the 
solid things in space, and space itself, are found to 
dissolve into what he called sense ideas, but what 
we may call sense impressions, or phenomena of sense. 
These impressions or phenomena, through custom -in- 
duced " suggestions " of their actual but arbitrarily estab- 
lished relations of coexistence and succession, are gradu- 
ally converted — when our sense experience is in process 
of making — into perceptions of what we now call the 
"qualities" of "sensible things." Thus, not "the mani- 
fold " (as Kantists say) of the visual sense, but the entire 
" manifold " of our sense impressions, becomes — through 
what Berkeley calls " suggestion," — an intelligible phe- 
nomenal world, which, because intelligible, can be con- 
verted by us into natural science. Visual signs and 
visual symbolism accordingly expand, in the ' Treatise on 
Human Knowledge,' into sense signs generally, or natural 
symbolism. The successive and coexisting phenomena 
of colour, and visible size, shape, and position; of re- 
sistance and tangible size, shape, and position, involved 
in the consciousness of our bodily movements ; of sound, 
taste, smell, heat and cold, — all go to make up the 
alphabet of our real perceptions of solid, extended, and 
movable things. The letters of this natural alphabet 
of the senses would have been meaningless if they had 
not been the mind-dependent phenomena of sense, pre- 
sented by Mind, and interpreted by finite minds, which 
we find them to be. Were they not this, we could 
not have had any experience of what is real at all. 



Sensuous Phenomena are Significant. 51 

We begin to learn the letters of this natural alphabet 
when we first use our five senses. In continuing to use 
til em, we gradually learn, through a rude and crude ex- 
perience, the meaning implied in their orderly connec- 
tions. The intelligence thus by degrees awakened in the 
"suggestions" which follow, is what we call our "sen- 
suous perception " of the material world. It is through- 
out previsive. Developed sensuous perception is just 
expectation, and expectation is essentially prophetic. 

Take any material object — large or small — a planet or 
a grain of sand ; inorganic or organic — a mountain or a 
man's body. We find, when we reflect, Berkeley would 
argue, that our real knowledge of it is, — that it consists 
of significant sense phenomena, dependent on sentient 
minds, aggregated in the clusters we call individual 
things simply by the constant orderliness or significance 
of their phenomenal constituents. These clusters of 
phenomena are in turn isolated from one another, so as 
to make up the separate "things" we see, by help of our 
perception and imagination of visible space. The sense 
phenomena of which the individual and locally sepa- 
rate things of sense are made up, rise, we find, in the 
current of our personal consciousness, without efibrt 
on our part, and indeed without our being able to 
summon or to dismiss them at our pleasure. The laws 
which govern their appearance, disappearance, and re- 
appearance in our perceptions, are not laws made by us, 
or which we can change. But the daily employment of 
every human being is that of interpreting, well or ill, 
the sense phenomena of which he is thus the subject, 
and on which his happiness is found largely to depend. 
He is daily determining, by the sense phenomena of 



52 Berkeley, 

which he is actually conscious, what others, which he 
is not yet conscious of, may be expected by him, and by 
other sentient beings. Progress in this work of inter- 
pretation is what we commonly call progress in know- 
ledge of nature. In the very beginning of this pro- 
cess of interpreting sense phenomena, we find ourselves 
obliged to assign to the phenomenal clusters what we 
call their respective places, sizes, and distances from one 
another ; ^ we are by this means helped to realise, with 
distinctness, the real and very practical " dream " in 
which we all share — of a world of phenomenal things, 
contained in a vast ambient phenomenal sphere, — a 
world, too, by which we find the pains and pleasures of 
our conscious lives are very much affected throughout 
their whole course. 

Berkeley's theory of Knowledge, in this Treatise, is 
an attempt to explain by " suggestion," and ultimately 
by common sense or ineradicable faith, the practically 
real dream in which human life, amidst the transitory 
shows of sense, is found to consist. The explanation 
is given in his account of the construction of sense 
knowledge and physical science, out of phenomena or 
impressions, dependent on a being who is conscious of 
them. How, for instance, he has to ask, does my merely 
private or subjective "feeling of heat and colour "get 
translated into part of this universal or objective dream — 
if we may call that a dream which is so practically real 
— as it does in the judgment, "I see the sun " *? How 

1 This may be compared with Kant's account of the manner in 
which, through our a i^riori perception of space, the irrelative phe- 
nomena of sense are obliged to take on space and time relations, as 
the condition of their metamorphosis into "objects," from their 
original chaos. 



Translation of Sensuous Phenomena into Things. 53 

does my phenomenal sense of resistance, and colour, and 
odour become the perception of an orange ? In these 
perceptions we know "things" in their "qualities," and 
do not merely feel transitory, uninterpreted sense impres- 
sions. If we did not rise above these last, we could 
have no sense experience of the " sun " or the " orange ; " 
and therefore no experience at all in any intelligible 
meaning of the word. There must therefore be some- 
thing more, a Berkeleyan may be supposed to argue, in 
external things than meaningless sense phenomena or 
sense impressions, incapable of suggesting expectations, 
and which per se can never translate themselves into per- 
ception or sense knowledge. What is this " something 
more," through which the impressions were converted 
into the sun or the orange — things which are now 
distinctly recognised as real by the eye or the hand? 

This deep question never occurs to the unphilosophical, 
and so it does not perplex them. 

The philosophers, in Berkeley's time and previously, 
had answered it in a way that seemed to him the chief 
cause of the triumphs of scepticism in its perennial 
struggle with faith. For they had, he thought, given 
a merely abstract answer, unrealisable in any human 
imagination; and that although an intelligible and 
easily realisable one lay ready to their hands. They 
had thus confused the minds of men, and put into cir- 
culation a number of meaningless words. " It might 
with reason be expected," he exclaims, in the open- 
ing sentences of his new book on * Human Knowledge,' 
" that those who had spent most time and pains in 
philosophy should enjoy a greater calm and serenity 
of mind, a greater clearness and evidence of knowledge, 



54 Berkeley. 

and be less disturbed with doubts and difficulties than 
other men. Yet so it is, we see the illiterate bulk of 
mankind, that walk the highroad of plain common 
sense and are governed by the dictates of nature, for 
the most part easy and undisturbed. To them nothing 
that is familiar appears unaccountable, or difficult to 
comprehend. They complain not of any want of evi- 
dence in their senses, and are out of all danger of 
becoming sceptics. But no sooner do we depart from 
sense and instinct to follow the light of a supreme prin- 
ciple — to reason, meditate, and reflect on the nature of 
things, but a thousand scruples spring up in our minds 
concerning those things which before we seemed fully 
to comprehend. . . . The cause of this is thought \e.g,^ 
by Locke] to be the obscurity of things, or the natural 
weakness and imperfection. of our understandings. . . . 
But perhaps we may be too partial to ourselves, in 
placing the fault originally in our faculties, and not 
rather in the wrong use we ourselves make of them. 
It is a hard thing to suppose that right deductions 
from true principles should ever end in consequences 
which cannot be maintained or made consistent. . . . 
Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far 
greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have 
hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to 
knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves — that we have 
first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see." ^ 

Berkeley's aim, accordingly, was to recover men from 
misleading abstractions of metaphysicians ; and to do 
this by an appeal to their own common sense or in- 
tuitive consciousness of certainty — after he had, in the 

1 Works, vol. i. pp. 137, 138. 



A Beturnfrom Abstraciions. 55 

first place, induced them to develop it by reflection. This 
was virtually to think back into the Eternal Eeason, in 
which we all consciously or unconsciously share ; and 
which the things of sense either conceal or reveal, in pro- 
portion as we have a superficial or a deep perception of 
their meaning. The empty answer of mere metaphysi- 
cal abstraction to the question about the ultimate mean- 
ing of the word Matter was his crucial instance, as 
Bacon would say, of philosophically raised "dust," foL 
lowed by the complaint that "we cannot see." Even 
Locke had taught that the very things of sense them- 
selves were not actually present in perception, but only 
those effects of their power which we call " sensations " 
— pleasant and painful ; and he had further taught that 
we are obliged, by our instinctive causal judgment, to 
refer sensations to independent extended bodies that 
are unperceived in sense, and whose existence we can 
only infer. He had distinguished bodies, in their pri- 
mary qualities or mathematical essence, from bodies in 
their relative or secondary qualities ; which last depend, 
he held, on the mathematical relations of the atoms 
of matter to a sentient organism. In the absence of 
all sentient organism, Locke's Matter had only the 
qualities which make its mathematical essence, and 
which were called primary. These last, as well as the 
former, he further taught, are the attributes of an un- 
perceived substance ; and of pure substance we have no 
other notion, he confessed, than that it is "a something 
we know not what." In all this, Berkeley insisted, 
there is nothing conceivable or that we can realise in 
imagination, except the sense phenomena of which per- 
sons are conscious. The supposed mathematical qualities 



56 Berkeley, 

existing independently of the others, and the pure sub- 
stance, too, are only empty metaphysical abstractions. 
They must be melted into sensuous phenomena, like the 
secondary qualities. With these last, indeed, when we 
look into the facts, we find the former are inseparably 
blended, and they must therefore share their fate. 

It was this dark background, this misleading fiction 
of a metaphysical substance, Berkeley thought, that 
made the merely phenomenal realities we see and touch 
conceal the Eternal Spirit and Eeason within. When 
once this fictitious power and substance of Matter, 
endowed with unsensuous qualities, was acknowledged. 
Matter became the convenient centre to which whatever 
happened in the universe of sense and of consciousness 
might be referred as its cause. The phenomena pre- 
sented to our senses, and hitherto attributed to Matter, 
were, for the mass of mankind, the very type and 
standard of reality. This supposed independent Matter 
in the dark background was accordingly deified, and 
was offered as the last explanation not only of what is 
perceived, but also of the percipient act. Even Locke 
raised much " philosophical dust" about Matter, and then 
complained that he "could not see." Materialists since 
Locke, still adopting abstract and unintelligible dogmas, 
fancy that they find in dead, unconscious, material pheno- 
mena, " the promise and potency of all self-conscious life." 

In the midst of the philosophical and popular pre- 
judice that Matter could do this or that — could make 
minds perceive, and could even evolve from itself all 
the reason and rational life that exists — Berkeley loudly 
called for an answer to certain previous questions, the 
answers to which had been, and still were, too dogmati- 



Uselessness of Unphenomenal Matter, 57 

cally assumed. What, he asked, is the true philoso- 
phical meaning of the words Matter, Space, and Force 1 
Does the principle of intuitive certainty, or common 
sense (in the philosophical meaning of " common sense "), 
afford any ground for attributing either an independent 
subsistence or independent powers to the sense-presented 
phenomena which compose the phenomenal things seen 
and touched ? Let us inquire, he may be supposed to 
ask, what the actual office of sense phenomena and 
phenomenal things is, in a human conscious life. What 
am' I justified, as a reasonable human being, in assum- 
ing, when I say that in my perception of a stone, for 
instance, I am not merely conscious of certain transient 
sense impressions of colour and hardness, but that 1 
know something that is not transient, nor subject to 
causal metamorphoses, like the appearances given in the 
senses — that is not dependent on any one being per- 
cipient of it, but is on the contrary persistent, through 
all changes and interruptions of conscious state and act 
in all intelligent beings'? Bravely press questions of 
this sort — one almost hears Berkeley saying throughout 
his book — and then any one who can truly read the 
revelations of the common consciousness must put a 
very different interpretation upon *' reality '' in the 
world of sense phenomena, from the absurd and con- 
tradictory interpretation put upon it by Locke, and in- 
deed by the whole array of philosophers. For it can 
be demonstrated that the dark entities called Matter 
and Space, and the " powers " Matter is supposed to 
possess, are not only unnecessary — because expressive 
of no known office discharged by sense phenomena 
and phenomenal things in the economy of our experi- 



5S Berkeley. 

ence — ^but that the very suppositions they proceed upon 
are meaningless, and even expressly self-contradictory. 
They are the " dust " raised by those who find in con- 
sequence that they "cannot see." 

In order to correct all this, Berkeley simply tried to 
be more thorough-going than Locke. The * Essay on 
Human Understanding ' had only done half its work, he 
thought, when its author had indulged in the presup- 
position involved in the use of his favourite term idea 
— that Matter, in its secondary qualities only, must con- 
sist "partly" of spirit, or rather of spirit - dependent 
phenomena. The truth was, he argued, there could 
be no such unphenomenal Matter, independent of all 
conscious experience, as the residuum, with its primary 
or mathematical qualities, supposed by Locke. The 
only substantial and powerful realities must be spirits : 
all other real things must be significant or orderly sense 
phenomena or impressions — presented in the form of 
individual phenomenal things to spirits by spirits. The 
phenomenal things which alone we see and touch, while 
very real, are, because phenomenal, unsubstantial and 
impotent : the counter - hypothesis of unphenomenal 
things, perceived or unperceived, is either a self-contra- 
diction or meaningless. 

On the other hand, we do find a persistence and power, 
involving neither inconsistency nor meaninglessness of 
verbal abstraction, implied in the fact of our being con- 
scious or having experience. This is found in the 
inevitable use, for all purposes of experience, of the 
personal pronoun "L" Here is a sufficient ground 
for the assertion, that if the universe is to be reorarded 



Reality of Unjplienomenal Spirit. 59 

philosophically, it must, in the last analysis, be regarded 
as composed of spirits or self-conscious persons, with 
their respective sense phenomena, by which as signals 
they are brought into communion with one another. 
This conception of things and persons had appeared 
in the "Commonplace Book/' " ]N'o thing," he there 
wrote, — " nothing properly but persons — ^. e., con- 
scious things — does exist. All other things are not so 
much existences themselves as manners of the existence 
of conscious persons." The universe, so conceived, 
seemed to him an intelligible universe, from which the 
dust of metaphysical abstractions had been cleared away. 
One knows what one means in using the personal pro- 
nouns "I" and *'you." One's own continued personal 
existence, through all changes and interruptions of con- 
scious state and act, is a fact of which all sane people 
are convinced. It is a datum of the common sense or 
common reason — a principle involved in the very con- 
stitution of a conscious experience. One understands, 
too, what one means by significant and therefore inter- 
pretable sense phenomena. But a pretended unperceived 
and unperceiving substance and power, which philoso- 
phers dogmatically affirm, when they speak of Matter 
and its forces ; and which ordinary mortals, echoing their 
meaningless jargon, speak about too — this is empty ver- 
balism, which is not, because it cannot be, experienced 
in sense, or imagined either, by any human or other 
conscious being. Accordingly we find ourselves obliged, 
when we verify the meanings of the words we use, 
to think of the Universe as consisting only of our 
own self-conscious spirits, persistent and powerful, and 
of other self-conscious spirits in like manner persistent 



60 Berkeley, 

and powerful ; — each spirit percipient of its own interpre- 
table sense phenomena. It is by interpreting these pheno- 
mena that each is able to form natural science ; also, by 
using the phenomena of sense as signals of communica- 
tion with one another, we can discover in some degree the 
states and acts of the other conscious spirits that coexist 
with our own — all governed and sustained in this Cosmos 
by the supremacy of Spirit. In a habitual conception of 
the Universe as so constituted, Berkeley believed that 
the " dust " metaphysicians had raised by their meaning- 
less abstractions would soon subside. 

All this may be viewed as a dawning apprehension on 
his part of the higher truth — that visible and tangible 
things, as phenomenal of the deepest and truest reality, 
are only the shows of life, which dissolve into insignifi- 
cance when reflection reveals the Eternal Spirit or Eeason 
beyond, in which we all live and have our being. In true 
philosophy we become speculatively aware of all this : 
we realise it practically in the divine life of religion. 

And all this, Berkeley would say, is at bottom in- 
tuitively seen to be true. It is too evident to admit of 
being proved by reasoning. The conception, he would 
have added, is found on trial to satisfy the essential facts 
of experience, and to resolve the difhculties of thought ; 
and if it can do this, it has the only sort of evidence that 
is available for any philosophical theory. The office of 
reasoning in philosophy is to call out the latent common 
sense, and also to raise it above the level at which it 
rests in the stupid gaze of the unreflecting multitude ; 
though Berkeley insists that even their confused concep- 
tion turns out in the end to be nearer his reconciling 
truth than the abstractions of the schools, or the halting 



Tlie World Externalised in other Spirits, 61 

metaphysics of Descartes and Locke. "It is indeed an 
opinion strangely prevailing among men," he exclaims, 
"that houses, mountains, rivers, in a word, all sensible 
things, have an [abstract] existence, distinct from their 
being [actually] perceived [by any person]. But with 
how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this 
principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever 
shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I 
mistake not, find it to involve a manifest contradic- 
tion." That is to say, it would be a contradiction 
to suppose that we see what is at the same time un- 
seen — that we are conscious phenomenally of that 
which is unphenomenal — that we are conceiving what 
is inconceivable. We cannot detach phenomena from 
perception, apart from which they must cease to be 
phenomenal. All this is self-evident. "Some truths 
there are," he proceeds, " so near and obvious to the mind, 
that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such 
I take this important truth to be, that all the choir 
of heaven and furniture of the earth — in a word, all 
those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the 
world — have not any substance without a mind; that 
their very being is to be perceived or known [?.e., to be 
part of the significant and interpretable sense experience 
of a conscious person] ; that, consequently, so long as 
they are not actually perceived by me, or do not actually 
exist in my mind or in that of any created spirit, they 
must either have no existence at all [which would be 
contrary to common sense], or they must exist in the 
mind [thought and will] of some Eternal Spirit." 

Berkeley's " external world " thus, in its deepest mean- 
ing, consists of spirits external to his own spirit ; con- 



I 



62 Berkeley. 

soious, in concert with himself, of intelligible and inter- 
pretable sense impressions, by which, as sense signals, 
they can communicate with one another. This external- 
ity of spirit to spirit is realisable in thought. One can 
understand what is meant in saying that one's own per- 
sonal consciousness, with its successive states or acts, is 
numerically different from the conscious life of another 
person. The one conscious life might cease, and the 
other still go on ; just as self-conscious lives, with their 
respective sense experiences, were going on long before 
one's own began. Powers of this sort, external to the 
individual spirit, can conceivably, and do actually, exist. 
It is really such external powers that our common sense 
— if we reflect on what it means — obliges us to 
acknowledge, when each of us finds himself obliged to 
acknowledge the existence of a world external to his 
own individual experience. But this externality of in- 
dividual spirits to individual spirits, with their respect- 
ive interpretable sense experiences, which is an intelli- 
gible sort of "externality," seemed enough for the de- 
mand of common sense. Even if the hypothesis of 
unperceived and unperceiving external substance were 
not absurd or contradictory, it was enough to say with 
Occam, entia non sunt multipllcanda prceter necessitatem. 
" I assert, as well as you," Berkeley could say, "that, since 
we are all affected independently of our will and contriv- 
ance, we must grant the existence of forces without, refer- 
able to some being not ourselves, and for whose activity 
we are not responsible. The point of difference is as to 
loliat this powerful external being is. I will have it to 
be conscious spirit ; you abstract independent matter, or 
I know not what third nature. I prove it to be spirit. 



Faith that we are living in a Cosmos. 63 

For, from the effects I find produced in my senses, I 
conclude that there must be action going on indepen- 
dently of my personal power, and because action, voli- 
tion ; but if there are external volitions, there must be a 
Will external to my own, for my will is the centre only 
of my own personality and sphere of responsibility. 
Again, the things I see and touch, or else their arche- 
types, must exist out of me ; but, the things being phe- 
nomenal only, neither they nor their archetypes can ex- 
ist phenomenally otherwise than as perceived or perceiv- 
able. There is therefore an external Intellect, ^ow. 
Will and Intellect constitute spirit. The powerful Cause 
of impotent and unsubstantial, but for us practically 
real, significant, and interpretable phenomena of sense, 
must therefore be Spirit.'' 

Berkeley's belief in the existence of an external 
material world thus resolves into belief that the phe- 
nomena of sense coexist and undergo metamorphoses 
cosmically — not chaotically. This belief itself he vir- 
tually regards as, and indeed denominates, a con- 
viction of the "common sense," developed by custom 
or experience. Accordingly, in dealing with sense-given 
phenomena, he proceeds on this common sense assump- 
tion, that they are intelligible, or that they make an 
experience which is interpretable ; and that they are also 
the common medium through which the existence of other 
conscious persons, with some of their individual experi- 
ences, may be ascertained by each percipient. Belief in 
the existence of the material world, according to Berke- 
ley's explanation of it, is belief in this ; and the practi- 
cal dissolution of this belief he would at once grant to 
be inconsistent with the saneness of the person in whose 



64 Berkeley, 

mind it was dissolved. He was ready to retain the name 
"matter," provided that we all accustom ourselves to 
mean only this when we use it. Things being only ideal 
or phenomenal — that is, being only significant or inter- 
pretable appearances, whose actual reality consists in their 
orderly manifestation by and to a conscious mind — does 
not dissolve them in chaos or illusion. On the contrary, 
we find ourselves obliged by common sense, in every action 
we perform, to take for granted that sense phenomena 
(mixed up though they are with our own consciousness, 
and dependent for their phenomenal character upon a 
person being conscious of them, nevertheless) spring up 
independently of individual consciousness, in an orderly 
or intelligible, and therefore interpretable way ; and we 
have all hitherto found that the assumption we are thus 
obKged to make has been verified by the event. The 
chaos of sense phenomena, which at first seems to burst 
upon our nascent being, becomes, through this common 
sense suggestion, converted in our thoughts into the 
cosmos which all physical research presupposes, and 
which the discoveries of science are making more and 
more familiar to each succeeding generation. The obli- 
gation to assume cosmos to be latent in what at first 
would seem to be a chaos of sense phenomena, is the 
firm platform on which we emerge from the obscure 
infantile consciousness of sensations. This common 
sense obligation, however produced, and not the irrational 
state of the sensuous infant, is surely our criterion of 
reality. Our developed and therefore intelligible expe- 
rience is surely more real and trustworthy than our un- 
intelligible sensations; and that whatever the process 
may be according to which the development takes place. 



Tlie " Something more " than Phenomena. 65 

The individual things we perceive are thus, for Berke- 
ley, more than mere isolated sense phenomena. They 
are sense phenomena which, in the way now explained, 
are connected in clusters or aggregates, and in their 
ordered aggregates form the system of nature — all 
evoked for us from the chaos of our infant sensations in 
the custom-developed expectations of common sense. 
Our knowledge of a planet, or of a grain of sand, is 
resolved, under this metaphysical analysis, into the intel- 
ligible common sense belief, that sense phenomena can- 
not exist in isolation — that, on the contrary, each is sig- 
nificant of other sense phenomena, of which at the time 
one is not actually conscious, and which therefore are 
not at the time phenomenal in sense, but which, under 
ascertainable rules, may become phenomenal There is 
in this the all-pervading belief that phenomenal changes 
cannot be capricious, but must proceed according to 
rules, on the observance of which our personal happiness 
depends. Faith in these rules is the " something more '' 
than mere phenomena, which forms the very essence of 
our belief in material things ; for it is that without which 
phenomena could not be converted into "phenomenal 
things," nor our experience be rationally constituted. 

This common sense conviction is at the bottom of 
Berkeley's explanation of our so-called "perception" of 
the things of sense. He finds it in all men ; but 
in individuals, during infancy, it is only imperfectly 
awake. Although it is the animating soul of human 
action — the very essence of reasonableness — it is, as such, 
incapable of independent proof. The permanence of 
law in nature — the intelligibility or rationality of the 
system of phenomena in which we find ourselves — is 

p. — III. B 



66 Berkeley. 

taken for granted, because we cannot help taking it for 
granted, if we are to have any experience of placed 
things.^ These would dissolve in chaos if we ceased 
for a moment to take it for granted. It is this persistent 
conviction that is the pith and marrow of perceptions of 
sense, and of expectations about the things of sense ; 
also of physical or natural science, which is only a 
further development of ordinary perception or expecta- 
tion. It is the deepest reality, which, after reflective 
analysis of our beliefs, we can find latent in our ordinary 
and also in our scientific conceptions of the world. An 
apple, for instance, consists of sense phenomena which 
are the appointed signs of each other— their significance 
being its "consistence." It is not true to say that I 
can see the apple which is placed before my eyes; 
for I can see only those phenomena, in the phenomenal 
apple, that are visible : many of the qualities of an 
apple are invisible ; for they are tangible, gustable, 
odorous, &c. Still — through common sense trust in 
what the visible phenomena naturally signify — I have 
a rational assurance that, being conscious as I am of the 
visible phenomena, I might, if I pleased, become con- 
scious of those other phenomena commonly called the 
taste, or the smell, or the hardness of the apple. In 
other language, the visible phenomena " suggest " the 
other phenomena, as naturally aggregated with them, 
in an objective order, thus creating and guaranteeing 
their practical objectivity to each suggesting mind. 
As far as one can affirm, prior to experience, any sort 

1 So Berkeley held ; for he regarded space and its relations as an 
arbitrary issue of natural law and arrangement, not, like Kant, as 
the necessary precondition of our converting relationless impressions 
into objects. 



Phenomenal Order and the Eternal Order, 67 

of sense phenomenon might, in orderly coexistence or 
succession, be cosmically connected with any other sort 
of sense phenomenon. So far as that goes, the connec- 
tions of phenomena in the real phenomenal world may 
be called "arbitrary.''^ We have, notwithstanding, a 
worhing trust that particular sorts of sense phenomena, 
which we find now connected under physical law with 
certain other phenomena, will continue connected with 
such, so that the one sort is permanently — ie., really — 
the sign of the other sort ; and may, in all circumstances, 
be trusted to for being this, till we discover some deeper 
law to which the observed connection is subordinate, 
and by which it may be modified. This deeper law 
may in turn be the subordinate of one deeper and more 
comprehensive still, and so on indefinitely. But however 
far we go, we cannot outrun our faith in an ultimate 
order, meaning, or rationality — moral it may be at last, 
and not properly physical or sensible. That there is 
an Eternal Order or Eeasonableness in the universe 
is involved in our own rationality : — Eternal Order or 
Eeasonableness, this at least is not arbitrary. Eut the 
established order of sense-phenomenal nature is arbitrary, 
if it might have been, or may ever become, other than 
it now phenomenally is. And this, for all we can tell, 
it might have been, or may yet become, in consistence 
with the deepest and truest Order of All, which is God — 

" Whose kingdom is where time and space are not." 

It was thus that Berkeley transformed Locke's world 
of sense. Locke phenomenalised the secondary quali- 

1 As Berkeley calls them — reiterating this '' arbitrariness " of the 
laws of nature. 



68 Berkeley. 

ties of matter, while still holding to the dogma of in- 
dependent material substances and powers. Berkeley 
phenomenalised all the qualities of matter — dismissed as 
superfluous Locke's unphenomenal substances or causes 
of secondary qualities — and explained reality in pheno- 
menal things, by the activity of Locke's Eternal Mind, in 
and through whom phenomena, otherwise isolated and 
meaningless, become aggregated in a scientifically intel- 
ligible system. Common sense asserts that we know 
external things as they are ; Berkeley explains that ex- 
ternal things as they are are only phenomenal things, and 
thus tries to reconcile Philosophy with Common Sense. -^ 

1 Berkeley's express aim was to show the harmony of the philoso- 
phical or rational intuition of the universe with common sense, right- 
ly understood. I am glad to adduce in support of this the high 
authority of the late Dean Mansel, in his comparison of Berkeley 
with Keid : *'The two systems [Keid's and Berkeley's] may be re- 
garded as in truth sister streams, springing from the same source, 
and flowing, though by different channels, to the same ocean. The 
aim of both alike was to lay a sure foundation for human knowledge 
in principles, secure from the assaults of scepticism ; the method of 
both alike was to appeal to the common consciousness of mankind, 
as a witness to the existence of certain primary and ineradicable 
convictions on which all others depend, and to disencumber these 
convictions from the rash hypotheses and unwarranted deductions 
with which they had been associated and obscured in previous sys- 
tems of philosophy. Both, in short, though with very different 
results, were tmited in appealing from the theories of metaphysicians 
to the common sense of men." — Mansel on the '^Idealism of Berke- 
ley," in his • Letters, Lectures, and Eeviews,' p. 382 (1873). 

With Berkeley the reality of the material world is rooted in faith 
in the phenomenal order, and faith in phenomenal orderliness is part 
of the common sense of men ; while the supposition of unperceiv- 
able material substance is argued to be inconsistent with the com- 
mon sense out of which science springs. Consciousness of our spir- 
itual personality and agency, and faith in the principle of causality 
— the other pillar of Berkeley's system — are also regarded by him as 
part of our common sense. 



69 



CHAPTEE V. 

SIR JOHN PERCIVAL AND DR SAMUEL CLARKE. 

One is curious to ascertain the first impression pro- 
duced by Berkeley's new conception of the substance of 
Matter — as consisting not in an unknowable and incon- 
ceivable substratum, but in the rationally established 
and intelligible regulation of phenomena — and by his 
bold challenge to the philosophical world. We can 
now, for the first time, have this curiosity gratified. 
His hitherto unpublished correspondence with his friend 
Sir John Percival throws light on much that happened. 
He was himself eager, we find, to hear what people 
had to say about the philosophy promulgated in the 
' Treatise on Human Knowledge,' but in those days 
there was no periodical criticism to inform him at once. 
*' If when you receive my book," he wrote in July 1710 
to Sir John,^ then in London, " you can procure me the 
opinion of some of your acquaintances who are thinking 
men, addicted to the study of natural philosophy and 
mathematics, I shall be extremely obliged to you." In 
the month after he was assured that it was incredible 
what prejudice can work in the best geniuses — nay, 
1 Percival MSS. 



70 Berkeley, 

even in the lovers of novelty. " For I did but name 
the subject-matter of your book of Principles to some 
ingenious friends of mine," Sir John adds, " and they 
immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time 
refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do ; 
and indeed I have not been able myself to discourse on 
the book, because I had it so lately : neither, when I set 
about it, may I be able to understand it thoroughly, for 
want of having studied philosophy more. A physician 
of my acquaintance undertook to describe your person, 
and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought 
to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire and 
vanity of starting something new should put you upon 
such an undertaking ; and when I justified you in that 
part of your character, and added other deserving quali- 
ties you have, he said he could not tell what to think 
of you. Another told me an ingenious man ought not 
to be discouraged from exerting his wit, and said Eras- 
mus was not the worse thought of for writing in praise 
of folly ; but that you are not gone so far as a gentle- 
man in town, who asserts not only that there is no 
such thing as Matter, but we ourselves have no being 
at all. My wife, who has all the good esteem of you 
that is possible, from your just notions of marriage and 
happiness,^ desires to know, if there be nothing but 
Spirit and ideas, what you make of that part of the 
six days' creation that preceded man." 

1 Sir John Percival's marriage took place shortly before this letter 
was written, and Berkeley had sent his congratulations. Sir John 
was for many years a member of the Irish House of Commons. He 
was raised to the Irish peerage as Lord Percival in 1715, and in 1733 
as Earl of Egmont. In 1732 he obtained a charter to colonise the 
province of Georgia in North America. He died in 1748, aged 60. 



Misunderstandings. 7 1 

Berkeley's reply to this, written at Trinity College, 
Dublin, in September 1710, is philosophically interest- 
ing.-^ "I am not surprised," he says, "that I should be 
ridiculed by those who won't take the pains to under- 
stand me. My comfort is, that they who have entered 
most into what I have written speak most advantageously 
of it. If the raillery and scorn of those who critique 
what they will not be at the pains to understand had 
been sufficient to deter men from making any attempts 
towards curing the ignorance and errors of mankind, we 
should not have been troubled with some very fair im- 
provements in knowledge. The common cry's being 
against any opinion seems to me, so far from proving it 
false, that it may with as good reason pass for an argu- 
ment of its truth. However, I imagine that whatever 
doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion had need 
be introduced with great caution into the world. For 
this reason it was that I omitted all mention of the non- 
existence of Matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, 
and introduction to my ^Treatise on Human Know- 
ledge,' that so the notion might steal unawares on the 
reader, who possibly would never have meddled with a 
book that he had known contained such paradoxes. If, 
therefore, it shall at any time be in your way to dis- 
course your friends on the subject of my book, I entreat 
you not to take notice to them that I deny the being of 
Matter in it, but only that it is a treatise on the prin- 
ciples of human knowledge, designed to promote true 
knowledge and religion, particularly in opposition to 
those philosophers who vent dangerous notions with 
regard to the existence of God and the natural immor- 
1 Percival MSS. 



72 Berkeley, 

tality of the soul, both which I have endeavoured to 
demonstrate, in a way not hitherto made use of." 

With characteristic energy he disclaims " vanity and 
love of paradox " as motives of the book, and professes 
an earnest belief in the non-existence of unphenomenal 
and unperceiving Matter, — " a belief," he adds, " which 
I have held for some years, the conceit being at first 
warm in my imagination, but since carefully examined, 
both by my own judgment and that of ingenious friends." 
What he deprecated most of all was, "that men who 
have never considered my book should confound me 
with the sceptics who doubt the existence of sensible 
things, and are not positive as to any one truth, no, not so 
much as their own being, which I find by your letter is 
the case of some wild visionist now in London.^ Eut 
whoever reads my book with attention will see that 
there is a direct opposition betwixt the principles con- 
tained in it and those of the sceptics, and that I question 
not the existence of anything that we perceive by our 

^ We see here how Berkeley disclaims, by anticipation, the meta- 
physical nihilism or pan-phenomenalism of Hume, according to whom 
*'I" am only a congeries of "impressions and ideas," out of whose 
union the notion of a self or subject is artificially formed in imagi- 
nation — and also disclaims the indetermination of Kant as to whether 
" I " am a permanent substance or a transitory phenomenon. Yet 
in several passages of his '' Commonplace Book," he himself verbally 
approaches a similar view. Thus he says, — " The very existence of 
ideas constitutes the soul. Mind is a congeries of perceptions. Take 
away perception, and you take away mind. Put the perceptions, and 
you put the mind." — Works, vol. iv. p. 438. To the same effect he 
is perplexed by the probability of unconscious intervals during sleep, 
which on this view would mean non-existence: he argues that we 
cannot exist in an unconscious state, but suggests a theory of time 
which might solve the difficulty. " One of my earliest inquiries was 
about Time, which led me into several paradoxes that I did not think 
fit or necessary to publish." 



Lady PercivaVs Difficulty. 73 

senses. As to your lady's objection," he continues, " I 
am extremely honoured by it. I must beg you to inform 
her ladyship I do not deny the existence of the sensible 
things which Moses says were created by God They 
existed from all eternity in the Divine Intellect, and 
then became perceptible {i.e.^ were created) in the same 
manner and order as is described in Genesis.-^ For I take 
creation to belong to things only as they respect finite 
spirits, there being nothing new to God. Hence it 
follows that the act of creation consists in God's willing 
that those things should become perceptible to other 
spirits which before were known only to Himself. IN'ow 
both reason and Scripture assure us that there are other 
spirits besides men, who, 'tis possible, might have per- 
ceived this visible world as it was successively exhibited 
to their view before man's creation. Besides, for to 
agree with the Mosaic account of the creation, it's suffi- 
cient if we suppose that a man, in case he was created 
and existing at the time of the chaos of sensible things, 
might have perceived all things formed out of it in the 
very order set down in Scripture, all which is no way 
repugnant to my principles." ^ 

Sir John in his next letter, written from London in 

1 Note this early expression of Platonic Idealism, blending with 
his phenomenalism {i. e. , with his ideaism, in the Cartesian and 
Lockian meaning of "idea"). 

2 This touches a difficulty often urged against the merely phenom- 
enalist conception of the reality of sensible things — viz., its incon- 
sistency with the real existence of the material world before there 
were human beings for whom there could be phenomena. Pheno- 
menalisation not being possible in the absence of sense-conscious 
spirits, the world, it is argued, could not have existed before man (as 
we know it did), if its reality is only phenomenal. It does not seem 
that Berkeley's explanation of this difficulty is weakened by any pro- 



74 Berkeley, 

October,^ reports that the new book had fallen into the 
hands of the highest English authority in metaphysics 
then living, still a young man under forty. This was 
Dr Samuel Clarke, who had produced his ' Demon- 
stration of the Being and Attributes of God ' four 
years before. Berkeley's ' Treatise ' had also been 
seen by Whiston, l!^ewton's successor at Cambridge. 
'' Two clergymen have perused your book — Clarke and 
Whiston. JNTot having myself any acquaintance with 
these gentlemen, I can only report at second hand that 
they think you a fair arguer and a clear writer, but 
they say your first principles you lay down are false. 
They look upon you as an extraordinary genius, but say 
they wish you had employed your thoughts less upon 
metaphysics, ranking you with Father Malebranche, 
J^orris, and another whose name I have forgot — all of 
whom they think extraordinary men, but of a particular 
turn, and their labours of little use to mankind on 
account of their abstruseness. This may arise from 
these gentlemen not caring to think after a new manner, 
which would oblige them to begin their studies anew, 
or else it may be the strength of prejudice.'' 

Berkeley was vexed by the expressions of Clarke 
and Whiston. He sent to Sir John's care a letter to 
each of them, hoping, through him, " to obtain their 
reasons against his notions, as truth is his sole aim ; " 
and there is nothing he more desires than being " helped 
forward in the search for truth by the concurring studies 
of thoughtful and impartial men. As to what is said 

gress in modern science. Discoveries in science can still be described 
in terms of perception or phenomena. 
1 Percival MSS. 



Dr Clarke declines to explain. 75 

of ranking me with Father Malebranche and Mr IS'orris, 
whose writings are thought to be too fine-spun to be of 
any great use to mankind, I have this answer, that I 
think the notions I embrace are not in the least coinci- 
dent or agreeing with theirs, but indeed plainly incon- 
sistent with them in the main points, inasmuch as I 
know few writers I take myself at bottom to differ more 
from than from them. Fine-spun metaphysics are what 
I on all occasions declare against, and if any one shall 
show anything of that sort in my Treatise, I will willingly 
correct it." 

"Your letters to Dr Clark and Mr Whiston," Sir 
John replied,^ "I delivered to two friends of theirs. Dr 
Clarke told his friend in reply that he did not care to 
write you his thoughts, because he was afraid it might 
draw him into a dispute upon a matter which was 
already clear to him. He thought your first principles 
you go on are false ; but he was a modest man, his friend 
said, and uninclined to shock any one whose opinions on 
things of this nature differed from his own." 

This was a great disappointment to Berkeley's youth- 
ful ardour. '' Dr Clarke's conduct seems a little surpris- 
ing," he writes.^ "That an ingenious and candid person 
(as I take him to be) should refuse to show me where 
my error lies, is something unaccountable. For my own 
part, as I shall not be backward to recede from the 
opinion I embrace when I see good reason against it, so, 
on the other hand, I hope to be excused if I am con- 
firmed in it the more upon meeting with nothing but 
positive and general assertions to the contrary. I never 

1 Dec. 28, 1710— Percival MSS. 

2 Jan. 19, 1711— Percival MSS. 



76 Berkeley, 

expected that a gentleman, otherwise so well employed 
as Dr Clarke, should think it worth his while to enter 
into a dispute with me concerning any notions of mine. 
But, seeing it was so clear to him that I went upon 
false principles, I hoped he would vouchsafe, in a line 
or two, to point them out to me, that so I may more 
closely review and examine them. If he but once did 
me this favour, he need not apprehend I should give 
him any further trouble, or offer any the least occasion 
for drawing him into a dispute with me. This was all 
my ambition, and I should be glad if you have oppor- 
tunity that you would let his friend know this. There 
is nothing that I more desire than to know thoroughly 
all that can be said against what I take for truth." 

The attempt failed. Clarke was not to be dra^vn into 
a statement of his objections in the complacent way in 
which, three years afterwards, he dealt with Joseph 
Butler, then a student at the Dissenters' Academy at 
Tewkesbury, in their famous correspondence about 
Clarke's 'Demonstration.' Berkeley's attempt to corre- 
spond with Clarke is, however, referred to by Whiston 
in his * Memoirs of Clarke.' "Mr Berkeley," he there 
says, "published in 1710, at Dublin, the metaphysical 
notion that Matter was not a real thing ; nay, that the 
common opinion of its reality was groundless, if not 
ridiculous. He was pleased to send Mr Clarke and 
myself each of us a book. After we had both perused 
it, I went to Mr Clarke to discourse with him about 
it to this effect, that I, being not a metaphysician, was 
not able to answer Mr Berkeley's subtle premises, though 
I did not believe his absurd conclusion. I therefore 



The Orderly Dream. 77 

desired that he, who "vvas deep in such subtleties, but did 
not appear to believe Mr Berkeley's conclusion, would 
answer him. Which task he declined/'^ 

What Clarke's answer to Berkeley would have been, 
if he had chosen to commit himself, we may perhaps 
gather from a passage in his published writings. Seven 
years after this correspondence through Sir J. Perci- 
val, he wrote as follows, in his *Eemarks on Human 
Liberty:' " The case as to the proof of our free agency is 
exactly the same as in that notable question. Whether 
the World exists or no ? There is no demonstration of 
it from experience. There always remains a bare possi- 
bility that the Supreme Being may have so framed my 
mind that I shall always be necessarily deceived in 
every one of my perceptions, as in a dream, though 
possibly there be no material world, nor any other 
creature existing besides myself. And yet no man in 
his senses argues from thence, that experience is no 
proof to us of the existence of things. The bare physi- 
cal possibility, too, of our being so framed by the Author 
of ]^ature as to be unavoidably deceived in this matter 
[our free agency] by every experience of every action 
we perform, is no more any just ground to doubt 
the truth of our liberty, than the bare natural possi- 
bility of our being all our lifetime in a dream, de- 
ceived in our behef of the existence of the material 
world, is any just ground to doubt the reality of its 
existence." 

The word '^ dream " is used in ordinary language for 
the illusory visions of sleep, so that it is apt to carry this 
connotation with it when employed to represent the phe- 



78 Berkeley, 

nomenal universe of Berkeley, with its steady order, and 
charged with its unfulfilled prophecies which regulate 
our actions.^ 

1 So Leibnitz contrasts the real dreams of sense reality with the 
capricious visions of the night : ** Nullo argumento absolute demon- 
strari potest, dari corpora ; nee quicquam prohibet somnia quaedam 
bene ordinata menti nostrse objecta esse, quae a nobis vera judicentur, 
et ob consensum inter se quoad usum veris sequivaleant." — De modo 
distinguendi Phaenomena Realia ab Imaginariis (1707). 



79 



CHAPTEE VI. 

THE OBJECTIONS TO IMMATERIALISM. 

The objections to the immaterialist theory of an essenti- 
ally spiritual universe, which reached Berkeley through 
Sir John Percival and others, annoyed him as expres- 
sions of misconception founded on prejudiced indiffer- 
ence. I^ot long after the publication of the First Part 
of the * Treatise on Human Knowledge,' accordingly, 
he began to prepare a volume of dialogues, in which, 
after the manner of Plato, plausible objections to the 
new doctrine could be readily discussed. The little 
book was published in London in the summer of 1713, 
and entitled, 'Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 
the Design of which is Plainly to Demonstrate the 
Eeality and Perfection of Human Knowledge, the In- 
corporeal [^Tature of the Soul, and the Immediate Pro- 
vidence of a Deity, in Opposition to Sceptics and 
Atheists.' Philonous tries to convince Hylas of the un- 
substantiality and impotence of the things of sense, and 
to show that, as revealed in the five senses, the world is 
altogether phenomenal and evanescent ; the permanence, 
independence, and powers attributed to things visible 
and tangible truly belonging to Eternal Mind, on whose 



80 Berkeley. 

Will they depend, and of whose Ideas their constitution 
and laws are the manifestation. 

English philosophical literature contains no work in 
which literary art and a pleasing fancy are more attrac- 
tively blended with ingenious metaphysical thought 
than in these ' Dialogues.' Soon after they appeared, 
Sir John Percival wrote ^ to their author that he was 
"satisfied he had now made his meaning much easier 
to understand, dialogue being the proper method for 
meeting objections." "It is not common," he added, 
" for men possessed of a new opinion to raise so many 
arguments against it as you have done. Indeed I am 
much more of your opinion than I was before. The 
least I can say is, that your notion is as probable as the 
one you argue against. There is at least equal difficulty 
against both opinions." 

It is always to be remembered that the ideas or phe- 
nomena of which things are composed, according to the 
Berkeleyan conception, are not, as with Eichte, modifi- 
cations of the mind to which they are presented, but 
are, on the contrary, perception - dependent presenta- 
tions, exhibited under "laws of nature," in individual 
minds. , They exist "in mind," in Berkeley's words, 
"not by way of mental mode or attribute, but by way of 
idea ; " and this is an altogether unique manner of ex- 
istence. We are each of us, accordingly, related to the 
"real phenomenal dream," with all its innumerable prac- 
tical consequences to us, simply as percipients and per- 
ceived — knowers and phenomenal things known — with 
whatever " otherness " this sui generis relation may be 
found to involve ; but we are not so related as that we 
1 July 17, 1713— Percival MSS. 



PAET II. — 1713-34 



CHAPTEE I. 

ENGLAXD, FRANCE, AXD ITALY. 

Early in January 1713, Berkeley, still full of his new 
thouglit about the phenomenal nature of things and 
their necessary dependence on Eternal Governing Spirit, 
found his way from Dublin to London, thus emerging 
for the first time from his " obscure corner." The 
College leave of absence given to him says that it was 
on the ground of " health," which may have suffered 
from the impetuous ardour expended in the ' Essay on 
Tision,' the 'Treatise on Human Knowledge,' and the 
''Three Dialogues.' In a letter from London, a few 
days after he got there, to Sir John PercivaV who was 
then in Dublin, he says that he had crossed the Channel 
" to print his new book of Dialogues, and to make ac- 
quaintance with men of merit, rather than to engage 
the interests of those in power." He describes the ad- 
ventures of his journey, and gives his first impressions 
of the new country, enlarging, with a genuine feeling for 

1 January 26, 1713— Percival MSS. 
P. IIL G 



98 Berkeley, 

nature in all its softer aspects, on the extraordinary 
beauty of rural England, even in winter, which he 
liked better than anything he saw in London. 

His good-natured erratic countryman, Eichard Steele, 
was among the first to welcome him on his arrival. In 
that same January letter, from the "Pall Mall Coffee- 
House in the Pall Mall," he mentions a meeting with 
Steele, and soon after he writes again that he dines often 
with him in Bloomsbury Square, " where he has a good 
house, table, servants, and coach. Somebody had given 
him my Treatise on Human Knowledge, and that was the 
ground of his inclination to my acquaintance. You will 
soon hear of him under the character of the * Guardian:' 
he designs his paper should come out every day, as the 
' Spectator.' " This was the house in Bloomsbury Square, 
" much finer, larger, and grander " than one Steele had al- 
ready had in Jermyn Street, for which he could not pay; 
or than another at Hampton, on which he had borrowed 
money, and which poor Steele with his " dear Prue " had 
taken in 1712 — where his unhappy landlord " got no bet- 
ter satisfaction than his friend in St James's, and where it 
is recorded that Dick, giving a grand entertainment, had 
half-a-dozen men in livery to wait upon his noble guests, 
and confessed that his servants were bailiffs to a man." ^ 

In this first summer in England, Berkeley wrote 
several essays in the ' Guardian,' mostly sarcastic squibs 
against materialistic free-thinkers, for whom Steele had 
a strong aversion. Although an immaterialist basis of 
religious thought is hardly perceptible in these papers, 
they show the direction in which he was disposed to 
apply his new conception of Matter, more evident twenty 
1 See Thackeray's * English Humourists of the Eighteenth Centurj-.' 



Steele and Collins. 99 

years afterwards, when lie engaged in controversy with 
the Free-thinkers in a more systematic way. 

This disposition may have been produced partly by 
his recollection of the old Toland controversies in Dub- 
lin, but it was now strengthened by the appearance 
of Anthony Collins's * Discourse of Free - Thinking,' 
shortly after his own arrival in London. We are less 
able than we should like to be to reproduce Collins as he 
lived and thought, for no sufficient biography of this re- 
markable man has been written. He was a barrister, bom 
of a good Essex family, who in 1713 was talked about 
in town, especially in the ecclesiastical world, on account 
of this httle book, most of which reads rather common- 
place to-day. Ten years before, this Essex gentleman had 
been in affectionate correspondence and companionship 
with Locke, at Lady Masham's at Gates, in the last year 
of Locke's life. The great author of the * Essay,' and of 
the * Letters on Toleration,' found himself wonderfully 
in sympathy with his young friend. He praised his love 
of truth and moral courage as superior to almost any he 
had ever known, and by his will he made him one of his 
executors. Soon after Locke's death, Collins got involved 
in ecclesiastical disputes, which made him conceive 
a strong antipathy to the clergy. He supported Dod- 
well against Clarke, by clever reasonings which Swift 
has preserved for ridicule in Martinus Scriblerus. In 
1709 he wrote against priestcraft, and assailed King, 
the Archbishop of Dublin, for his discourse on divine 
predestination and foreknowledge. Collins is remem- 
bered now by historians of philosophy for his contro- 
versy with Samuel Clarke about necessity and the moral 
agency of man, in which he states the arguments against 



100 Berkeley, 

human freedom with, a logical force unsurpassed by any 
necessitarian. In the 'Discourse of Free -Thinking/ 
he denounced priests, and believers in church religion, 
as enemies of honest philosophical inquiry, and the 
paid advocates of a foregone conclusion. This exclus- 
ive claim to freedom of research and candour, made 
by Collins and others of his school on their own be- 
half, roused Berkeley's indignation. !N'ow, and after- 
wards in the deistical and atheistical polemics of his 
middle life, he presents himself as the " free-thinking " 
antagonist of free-thinking materialists and necessitarians. 
There must be belief of some sort at the root of every 
human life, he means to say — for to live at all is to 
believe ; and he could not, he professed, find more can- 
dour and true courage in a creed of theological disbelief 
than in the creed of religious faith. 

His countryman. Swift, was one of Berkeley's patrons 
in these first weeks in London, as well as his country- 
man Steele. On an April Sunday in 1713, we find 
him at the Court of Queen Anne, in the company of 
Swift. "I went to Court to-day," Stella's journal 
of that Sunday records, " on purpose to present Mr 
Berkeley, one of our fellows of Trinity College, to Lord 
Berkeley of Stratton. That Mr Berkeley is a very ingeni- 
ous man and great philosopher, and I have mentioned 
him to all the Ministers, and have given them some of 
his writings, and I will favour him as much as I can." 
After that his name appears often in the famous jour- 
nal. Swift was as good as his word in helping him 
into the London world of letters, in the last year of the 
reign of Queen Anne, so that he became known as he 
deserved to " men of merit," and was brought into contact 



1 



Swift, 101 

with others on whom he would hardly have conferred 
this title. He told a friend long afterwards that he used to 
attend one of the free-thinking clubs, in the pretended 
character of a learner, and that he there heard Anthony 
Collins announce that he was able to demonstrate the 
impossibility of God's existence — ^whatever Collins may 
have meant by these words. The promised "demon- 
stration," Berkeley added, was afterwards in part pub- 
lished, in Collins's 'Philosophical Inquiry concerning 
Human Liberty,' which appeared in 1717, where he 
argues that every action attributed to man, as well as 
all else in the universe, must be the issue of Fate or 
causal Necessity. This might be interpreted as an 
attempt to demonstrate atheism, unless " God " is con- 
sidered only a synonym for Fate or l^ecessity. 

Swift had now been living in London for more than 
four years, in his "lodging in Bury Street," absorbed in 
the political intrigues of the last years of Queen Anne, 
and sending the daily journal to Stella, in Dublin, 
which so faithfully preserves the incidents of those 
years. Mrs Yanhomrigh and her daughter, the famous 
and unhappy " Yanessa," were settled near him in their 
house in the same street, and there, as he writes to 
Stella, he "loitered hot and lazy after his morning's 
work," and often dined "out of mere listlessness." This 
Yanhomrigh connection, as we shall see, had its effect 
on Berkeley's fortunes long afterwards. 

Li this summer of 1713, Pope, then hardly twenty- 
five years of age, was at Binfield, among the glades of 
Windsor, but not seldom too with Addison in their 
favourite coffee-house kept by Button near Covent Gar- 
den. Addison himself was in St James's Place, for 



102 Berkeley, 

a time withdrawn from politics, but giving literary 
breakfasts, preparing ' Cato,' and writing his refined 
essays in the 'Spectator' and the 'Guardian.' In a 
letter to Sir John Percival from "Pall Mall," written 
soon after his arrival in London,^ Berkeley mentions 
that the night before, "a very ingenious new poem 
upon Windsor Forest " was given to him " by the 
author, Mr Pope, a Papist, but a man of excellent wit 
and learning. Mr Addison," he goes on to say, "has 
the same talents as Steele, in a high degree, and is like- 
wise a great philosopher, having applied himself to the 
speculative studies more than any other of the wits here 
I know. I breakfasted with him at Dr Swift's lodgings 
in Eury Street. His coming when I was there, and the 
good temper he showed, I construed as a sign of an 
approaching coalition of parties. Dr Swift is admired 
by both Steele and Addison, and I think him one of 
the best-natured and most agreeable men in the 
world. Cato, a most noble play of his, and the only 
one he writ, is to be acted in Easter Week." Prom a 
subsequent letter, on the 18th of April, accordingly, 
we learn that, " on Tuesday last, Cato was acted 
for the first time. I was present with Mr Addison 
and two or three more friends, in a side box, where 
we had a table, and two or three flasks of Burgundy 
and champagne, with which the author (who is a 
sober man) thought it necessary to support his spirits, 
and indeed it was a pleasant refreshment between the 
acts. Some parts of the prologue, written by Mr Pope, 
a Tory and even a Papist, were hissed, being thought to 
savour of Whiggism, but the clap got much the better 
1 March 7, 1713— Percival MSS. 



Addison, Fojpe, and Arbuthnot, 103 

of the hiss. Lord Harley, who sat in the box next us, 
was observed to clap as loud as any in the house all the 
time of the play." — Swift and Pope have both given us 
their account of the first night of ' Cato : ' here for the 
first time we have Berkeley's. 

In the same week he mentions that he " dined at 
Dr Arbuthnot's lodgings in the Queen's Palace at Ken- 
sington," and that " he was the first proselyte he had 
made of the Treatise [^ The Three Dialogues '] he had 
come over from Dublin to print, and which will soon be 
published." Arbuthnot, the Aberdonian physician at the 
Court of the Queen, was a well-known leader in the 
Scriblerus Club, the witty assailant of the verbal meta- 
physics of the schools, and no mean authority on ques- 
tions of philosophy. 

Percival writes from Dublin in May, that he hears the 
book of * Dialogues ' is printed, though not yet published ; 
that immaterialism is daily gaining ground among the 
learned, as it becomes better understood; that Mr Addi- 
son is coming over to the new opinion ] and that now 
what seemed shocking at first is become so familiar that 
others envy him the discovery of the secret of matter, and 
would fain make it their own. " You have now, too," he 
adds, " an opportunity of gratifying one piece of curiosity 
I have heard you very inquisitive about ; I mean, the 
surprise of a person born blind when first made to see. 
One Grant, an oculist, has put forth an advertisement 
of his art in this way, with whom I believe you would 
find satisfaction in discoursing." i 

In the course of this summer, at the instance of 

Addison, it seems that a meeting was arranged between 

1 See 'Works/ vol. i. pp. Ill, 112, and note (Clarendon Press ed.) 



104 Berkeley, 

Berkeley and Dr Samuel Clarke, then the metaphysical 
rector of St James's in Piccadilly, whose objections he 
had in vain tried to draw forth three years before 
through Sir John Percival. Berkeley's indescribable 
fascination of manner and goodness of heart had charmed 
the world of London, and even Atterbury after an inter- 
view with him could say, " So much understanding, so 
much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, 
I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, 
till I saw this gentleman." Still, the new philosophical 
thought of the young Irishman was becoming a matter 
of ridicule to some of the wits, who translated it into 
the madman's paradox, that all we see and touch is only 
an idle fancy. Much was hoped from this meeting 
with Clarke, but it ended without any common under- 
standing, and Berkeley had again to complain that 
though Clarke did not refute his arguments, or show 
what he had unduly assumed in his argument, he had 
not the candour to accept the conclusion. 

Immaterialism, however, was springing up spontane- 
ously in other quarters. In a letter to Percival, in 
June, Berkeley mentions a " clergyman in "Wiltshire, who 
has produced a book in which he advances something 
published three years ago in my treatise concerning 
Human Knowledge." The allusion is to Arthur Col- 
lier's ^ Clavis Universalis, or IsTew Inquiry after Truth ; 
being a Demonstration of the ]^on-existence or Impossi- 
bility of an External World.' This curious little volume 
appeared in London early in the summer of 1713, full 
of acute arguments cogitated by its retired and studious 
author, in the peaceful seclusion of a rural English par- 
sonage not far from Salisbury. It was overlooked in 



Arthur Collier. 105 

Britain (but not in Germany) till Dr Eeid called atten- 
tion to it in his "Essays," seventy years after it was 
published.^ Long extremely scarce, it is now gener- 
ally accessible, in two editions, published in 1836 and 
1837. Collier, with much argumentative subtlety, is 
wanting in imaginative sentiment, and in that sense 
of the relation of immaterialism to the philosophy 
of religion, and the many sides of human life, which, 
along with his artistic beauty of conception and ex- 
pression, have enabled Berkeley to affect the main cur- 
rent of modern thought. Their intellectual points of 
view, too, were very different. Berkeley started from 
that love of experience, and aversion to the " vermiculate 
questions of the schools," in which he had been trained 
by Locke. Collier argued, from the abstract assump- 
tions of the cloister, in the spirit of a schoolman who 
was at the same time infected with the mysticism of 
Malebranche and ]N"orris. The coincidence is, neverthe- 
less, curious. Berkeley at least cannot have borrowed 
from Collier, who alludes in the ' Clavis ' to the ' Treatise 
on Human Knowledge,' but also tells us that as early 
as 1703 he had reached an immaterialist conclusion for 
himself. The coincidence shows the existence of some- 
thing in the intellectual atmosphere at the time favour- 
able to immaterialist ways of thinking about the world of 
which we are percipient in the senses. Collier, like Ber- 
keley, sought the judgment of Samuel Clarke about his 
reasonings, and was able to draw from him " a learned 
and civil answer," which unfortunately has been lost.^ 



1 See Hamilton's ' Reid/ p. 287, and note. 

2 See Benson's 'Memoirs of the Rev. Arthur Collier' (1837), pp. 
33-41. 



106 Berkeley. 

The Percival correspondence informs us for tte first 
time that Berkeley spent two months of this summer 
in Oxford, and that he found it "a most delightful 
place." "Grand performances," he writes to Percival, 
"have been going on at the Sheldonian Theatre, and 
a great concourse were at the Act, from London and 
the country, amongst whom were several foreigners, 
particularly about thirty Frenchmen of the ambassador's 
company, who, it is reported, were all robbed by a 
single highwayman." It is interesting to find that 
Oxford had thus early taken possession of his imagin- 
ation; for this was his first visit to the place which, 
forty years after, in a fit of academical idealism, be- 
came the chosen retreat of his old age. His new philo- 
sophy was not forgotten by him at Oxford. "As to 
what you write of Dr Arbuthnot not being of my 
opinion," he writes thence to Percival in August, " it 
is true there has been some difference between us con- 
cerning some notions relating to the necessity of the 
laws of nature ; but this does not touch the main point 
of the non-existence of what philosophers call material 
substance, against which he has acknowledged he can 
assert nothing." Though it "does not touch the main 
point," one would gladly have heard more about what 
seems to have touched Berkeley's favourite conclusion 
of the " arbitrariness " of the laws of nature, as opposed 
to that self-existence and "necessity" of the laws and 
properties of the material world, which men of science 
are so ready to take for granted. ^ 

^ On this subject, as recently treated on lines somewhat similar to 
Berkeley, see Sir Edmund Beckett, ' On the Origin of the Laws of 
Nature ' (London, 1879). 



Paris and Malebranche. 107 

So Berkeley's first spring and summer in England 
passed away. He spent the following winter in France 
and Italy. 

In October he wrote to Percival that he was " on the 
eve of leaving London, and going to Sicily as chaplain 
to Lord Peterborough, who is going ambassador-extra- 
ordinary on the coronation of the king." He was thus, 
on the recommendation of Swift, associated with the 
most briUiant wit amongst the political personages of that 
generation, who, as it happened, had a quarter of a cen- 
tury before been the intimate of Locke when they were 
both exiles in Holland, and afterwards one of his corre- 
spondents and visitors at Gates. He was now the friend 
of Swift and Pope. Ten months in Prance and Italy, in 
this connection, was a fresh experience of life to the fervid 
and ingenious reasoner, who had been viewed with curi- 
ous interest by the wits of London. It was one of the 
turns opening into the long course of restless movement, 
with occasional relapses into studious seclusion, which 
marked this middle period of Berkeley's life, in con- 
trast with its first and its last stages. He left his new 
thought about things to work its way at home among 
any who were inclined to think, and turned an eager 
inquiring eye to nature and art on the continent of 
Europe. Through his letters to Sir John Percival we 
can follow him on his journey. "Writing to him from 
Paris in iJ^ovember, he describes his adventures from 
London, and his companions on the road — among others, 
" a Scotch gentleman named Martin, who wrote about St 
KHda."! He adds, "The Abbe D'Aubigne is to intro- 
1 This was Murdoch Martin, a native of Skye, author of a * Voyage 



108 Berkeley, 

duce me to-morrow to Father Malebranche." Berkeley- 
was a month in Paris ; but we hear no more about Male- 
branche. On ]N"ew Year's Day he crossed Mont Cenis, 
in a storm of snow, and made Leghorn his headquarters 
till May, while Peterborough was in Sicily. In July 
he was again in Paris, on his way home. In August 
he returned to London. It was the month in which the 
whole outlook of English politics had been changed by 
the death of Queen Anne. 

The two next years were spent in London, with con- 
genial retreats now and then into the soft scenes of the 
midland and southern counties. His Percival correspon- 
dence at this time refers much to the rising in Scotland 
under Mar, which was the outcome of a course of 
intrigues and secret steps, intended to dethrone George 
I., and to set aside the Protestant succession. Another 
subject was the efforts of Berkeley's friends to find some 
preferment for him in the Irish Church. A groundless 
suspicion of Jacobitism, caused by some misinterpreted 
expressions in his discourses on "Passive Obedience," 
delivered in 1712 in Trinity College Chapel, and 
perhaps strengthened by the Cavalier traditions of his 
name, was not overcome even by the interest of Caro- 
line, the philosophical Princess of Wales, the friend of 
Clarke and Butler, and the correspondent of Leibnitz. 
In June 1716, Charles Bering, PercivaFs cousin, 
^vrote from Dublin that, after all that had been done 
by his friends, his prospects were bad, as " the 
Lords Justices had made a strong representation 

to St Kilda ' (1698), and a ' Description of the Western Islands of 
Scotland' (1703). 



Rolo Malebraiuhe died. 109 

against liim.'"' He had no encouragement to return 
to Ireland. 

InXovember 1716, accordingly, ^ve find him again on 
his 'way to Italy, "where he spent the four following years. 
Ashe, the Bishop of Clogher, Swift's friend, by whom 
Berkeley had been admitted to holy orders nine years 
before, had, it seems, persuaded him to accompany his 
son on a tour as his travelling tutor. 

It was about this time that the two most famous 
metaphysicians then living passed away. jMalebranche 
died at Paris in October 1715, and Leibnitz died at 
Hanover in November 1716. Berkeley was thus left 
in the front place — with Samuel Clarke and Anthony 
Collins in England, Buffier and Huet in France, Leclerc 
in Holland, and Yico in Italy, as his most distinguished 
contemporaries. Butler, Hutcheson, and Wolf were as 
yet unknown, and Shaftesbury was dead. 

The historians of philosophy have associated Berkeley 
with the death of Malebranche in a tragical way. " It 
forms an interesting circumstance in the history of these 
two memorable persons," according to Dugald Stewart, 
"that they had once, and only once, the pleasure of a 
short interview. The conversation, we are told, turned 
on the non-existence of matter. Malebranche, who had 
an inflammation in his lungs, and whom Berkeley found 
preparing a medicine in his cell, and cooking it in a 
smaU pipkin, exerted his voice so violently in the heat 
of their dispute, that he increased his disorder, which 
carried him off a few days after. It is impossible not to 
regret," Stewart adds, "that of this interview there is no 
other record ; or rather, that Berkeley had not made it 



110 Berkeley. 

the groundwork of one of his own Dialogues. Fine as 
his imagination was, it could scarcely have added to the 
picturesque effect of the real scene." ^ I fear that facts 
must henceforward make this celebrated story take its 
place among myths, for I find from the Percival Cor- 
respondence that Berkeley was in England throughout 
1715, the year in which Malebranche died. The only 
evidence that he ever saw the eloquent French idealist is 
the allusion to the promised introduction through the 
Abbe D'Aubigne, two years before. 

The philosophical doctrines of Malebranche and 
Berkeley about Matter have so much superficial re- 
semblance that the story of their tragical interview 
not unnaturally grew out of it. Berkeley, as we have 
already seen, disavowed all community with the French 
Father in his own new thought about the world, and 
maintained that no two sets of principles about real 
knowledge were more opposed than those of Male- 
branche and his own. The theory of Malebranche 
about matter was simply a development of the Cartesian 
theory of causation and power in the universe. For, 
according to Descartes, our sensations are not pro- 
duced by an active and external material substance, 
but by the constant agency of God; who makes us 
conscious of the appropriate perceptions, on occasion 
of correlative extra - organic changes, which, also by 
divine agency, affect our organism. This, no doubt, 
presupposes the existence of extra - organic matter, 

1 Stewart's " Dissertation " (' Works/ vol. i. p. 161, Hamilton's 
Edition). See also Stock's Life of Berkeley (prefixed to the old 
editions of Berkeley's Works) ; 'Biog. Brit.,* art. " Berkeley ;" and 
Advocat's *Dict. Hist.' There is a version of the story by De Quin- 
cey, in his essay on '' Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts." 



Berkeley, Malehranche, and Spinoza. Ill 

and its divinely communicated power of affecting 
the human body; but it also presupposes that per- 
ceptions corresponding to the organic affections could 
be caused only by Supreme Mind, and not by the 
derived power of matter. Such was the famed Car- 
tesian theory of occasional causation through divine 
assistance. Malehranche merely relieved it of an ex- 
crescence. Instead of sense perceptions produced in 
human minds by the constant divine agency inherent 
in extended things, he seems to have believed that we 
are, in a measure at least, conscious, in the Universal 
Eeason, of the very archetypal Ideas of the sensible 
world, ever present in the mind of God, in whom all 
finite spirits live and have their being. We aU exist 
in God, thought Malehranche, and in this way we aU 
become actually conscious of His Ideas that are in- 
volved in the constitution of sensible things. Instead of 
supposing numerically different sensible phenomena, ex- 
isting in each finite sentient spirit, as Berkeley was 
logically obliged to do, Malehranche found the same 
divine archetypal Ideas revealed in the common per- 
ceptions of men, who, on occasion of sense, rise into 
an apprehension of the Intelligible World, which the 
sensible one only dimly adumbrates. In this theory, as 
in Berkeley's, though for different reasons, independent 
Matter, if not contradictory in its very conception, is 
at least useless. Berkeley, perhaps, exaggerated their 
differences. In both there is the tendency to view the 
world of the senses as a superficial show, which dissolves 
into phenomena, and reveals the Eternal Mind as the 
true reality. But in Malebranche's view, finite voluntary 
agents are more lost in God. He thus approaches 



112 Berkeley. 

Spinozism, from which Berkeley was kept back by his 
conviction of the spiritual individuality in man that is 
involved in om^ moral and immoral agency. Berkeley 
phenomenalises finite things, but not finite persons. 

Berkeley's 'Italian Journal/ first published in 1871/ 
and his correspondence with Lord Percival, only now 
discovered, enable us to follow his movements in 1717 
more continuously and distinctly than in any other 
year of his life. "We see him at Eome in January and 
February, at !N"aples throughout April and May, and 
in the fairyland of Ischia in autumn. In 1718, most of 
the letters are dated at Eome, where medals and statues, 
pictures and architecture, filled his fancy. In archi- 
tecture he thought " the old Eomans inferior to the 
Greeks, and the moderns infinitely short of both, in 
grandeur, and simplicity, and taste." His strong sense 
of natural beauty, and even of community with external 
nature, favoured by his philosophic thought of the im- 
manence of divine power in the world of phenomenal 
reality, appears in his descriptions of Italy, and especially 
of his favourite isle of Ischia. His philosophy naturally 
leads to the recognition in the world of the senses of 
something " far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling 
is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and 
the living air." The taste for scenery so perceptible 
in his ' Dialogues,' and in his letters to Pope from the 
land of Theocritus and Yirgil, was little felt in England 
till it appeared in Gray and Shenstone, and still more 
in Cowper, and Scott, and Wordsworth. 

In 1719 Berkeley almost disappears from view. An 
1 See 'Works,' vol. iv. pp. 512-594 (Clarendon Press edition). 



Sicily and the lost Manuscripts. 113 

allusion in one of his letters shows that it was the year 
in which he made a pedestrian tour through Calabria 
and Sicily. He was particularly interested in Sicily, and 
collected materials for a natural history of the island, 
which were lost along with other manuscripts on the 
passage to I^aples. In the summer of the following 
year we find him on his way back to England. *' I 
hope we shall be in London before the cold weather 
comes on/' he wrote from Florence in July to Lord 
Percival. " I have indeed been detained so long, against 
my expectations and wishes, on this side of the Alps, 
that I have lost all patience. Every month these six 
months we have designed to begin our journey home, 
and have been as often disappointed." Later in the 
year he was with his pupil at Lyons. About the end 
of 1720 he reached London. 

Berkeley had now been away from L:eland for eight 
years, and in circumstances less favourable to continued 
meditation than when he was at Trinity College. But 
the charms of nature and art, and intercourse with 
"men of merit," had not withdrawn from his mind 
the thought about the phenomenal nature of the 
things of sense, which had so early transformed his 
habitual way of looking at life and the external world. 
The ' Treatise on Human Ejiowledge,' as already men- 
tioned, was avowedly an unfinished book when it 
appeared in 1710. A Second Part was then promised, 
but it never came, and the ' Three Dialogues ' closed his 
first and most productive period of authorship. He 
seemed to have abandoned the original design of that 
treatise, and his readers and critics have forgotten that 

p. — III. H 



114 Berkeley, 

it professed to be only a fragment. A lately discovered 
letter of his, written in Ehode Island ten years after 
his return from Italy, proves that there was no aban- 
donment ; and indeed we may infer from what he says 
there that the Second Part of the * Treatise on Human 
Knowledge ' was the first-fruit of his studies after he 
left his native island in 1713.^ This letter is besides 
instructive, as an expression of his own view of the three 
little books which were the fruit of his early philoso- 
phical studies in Ireland, before he was thirty years of 
age. 

" What you have seen of mine," he writes, " was published 
when I was very young, and without doubt hath many de- 
fects. For, though the notions should be true (as I verily 
think they are), yet it is difficult to express them clearly and 
consistently, language being framed to common use and 
received prejudices. I do not therefore pretend that my 
books can teach truth. All I hope for is that they may be 
an occasion to inquisitive men of discovering truth, by con- 
sulting their own minds, and looking into their own thoughts. 
As to the Second Part of my Treatise concerning the Prin- 
ciples of Human Knowledge, the fact is that I had made a 
considerable progress in it, but the manuscript was lost dur- 
ing my travels in Italy ; and I never had leisure since to do 
so disagreeable a thing as writing twice on the same subject." 

What that "subject" was we are left to conjecture. 
But we do know that Berkeley did not pass through 
France, on his way home in 1720, without showing that 
his mind was still given to the favourite thought of his 
early years in Ireland. A prize essay on the "Cause 
of Motion" had been proposed by the French Koyal 

1 See Dr Beardsley's ' Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson, 
D.D.' (New York, 1874), pp. 71, 72. 



The Cause of Motion. 115 

Academy. The subject was exactly in the line of 
Berkeley's early speculations, which had converged on 
the alternative of the unsubstantiality and impotence 
either of Spirit or of Matter. He accordingly prepared 
a Latin dissertation, De Motu, which was finished at 
Lyons on his way from Italy to England, and published 
after his return to London. Whether it was ever 
presented to the Academy seems uncertain. The prize 
at any rate was conferred on Crousaz, the well-known 
logician and professor at Lausanne. Berkeley's disser- 
tation shows the bent of his thoughts about this time. 
The unsubstantiality of Matter is left more in the back- 
ground. Its impotence is what he insists on, and on 
the intellectual need for the unphenomenal and free 
causation, found only in Spirit or active Eeason. Mens 
agitat molem might be the motto of the whole. He 
argues — with more dependence, too, on authorities, 
ancient and medieval, than in his former books — that 
the rational and voluntary activity of Supreme Mind, 
and subordinately of free finite agents, must be the 
uncaused cause of all changes in sensible phenomena. 
ISTatural law or physical causation is therefore not real 
causality, but only the arbitrarily constituted effect 
of the constant acting of the true and unphenomenal 
Cause. To represent science in this way, as only the 
interpretation of the (voluntarily ordered) laws of sen- 
sible or phenomenal change ; and to conclude that even 
mathematical space, so far as the term space has any 
positive meaning, is only an established coexistence of 
sense impressions, having no existence as a huge quan- 
titative Infinite, was too foreign to the prejudices of 
natural philosophers and mathematicians to find favour 



116 Berkeley, 

in the French Academy. The ordinary good sense 
of the imspeculative Crousaz was more likely to be 
accepted. 

This Latin tractate on the ultimate cause of Motion 
was Berkeley's last essay in philosophy for many 
years. Events in England after his arrival turned his 
enthusiasm for a time in a new direction — as a devotee 
in the service of Humanity. 



117 



CHAPTEE 11. 

SOCIAL IDEALISM AND AMERICA. 

On his return from Italy, Berkeley found the nation 
plunged into the agitation and misery that followed the 
failure of the South Sea scheme. He now threw him- 
self with his usual impetuosity, but with a direct prac- 
tical purpose, into the social and economical difficulties 
of the time, and the condition of England became 
his dominant interest. He was shocked by the prevail- 
ing tone of social morals. He seemed to see himself 
living in a generation averse to all lofty ideals, with 
whom the extreme of prudential secularism had super- 
seded the fanatical spiritualism of the preceding age. 
He was in collision, in short, with the bad elements of 
the eighteenth century. A commercial crisis had brought 
them out, and this was then a novelty. His ever-active 
imagination and eager temperament exaggerated the 
symptoms. They found vent in a fervid * Essay towards 
Preventing the Euin of Great Britain,' published in 
1721. 

The * Essay ' was a lamentation over the corrupt civi- 
lisation of England, by an ardent social idealist, who 
could now compare what he saw at home with life in 



118 Berkeley. 

other lands. We are undone, he seems to say, and lost 
to all sense of onr true interest. If we are to escape 
at all, it can only be by the persons who compose the 
nation becoming individually industrious, frugal, public- 
spirited, and religious. This, and not any royal road, is 
the way to the salvation of the country. Sumptuary 
laws might perhaps do something; masquerades might 
be prohibited; the theatre, which had been a school 
for taste and morals and experience of life to the 
ancients, and to England as well a century earlier, might 
perhaps be reformed; art might be made, as in other 
countries and ages, to inspire society with great thoughts 
and unworldly feelings. But till selfishness and sen- 
suality were superseded in individuals by public spirit, 
and atheistic free-thought by religious trust and rever- 
ence, the case seemed hopeless. In the South Sea dis- 
aster he saw not the root of the social disorder, but 
only one of many symptoms, all foreshadowing social 
dissolution. 

Though the few pages of this tract reveal no new 
thought in philosophy, they are important as a revela- 
tion of their author. This was the first distinct sjrmp- 
tom of that longing for the realisation of a state of 
society nearer his own pure and lofty ideal, which there- 
after mixed so much with what he wrote and did. We 
now hear for the first time the Cassandra wail of a 
sorrowful prophet, who soon after turned his eye of 
hope to other regions, in which a nearer approach to 
Utopia might be found. 

In passing from Italy to Ireland, he spent some 
months in London in 1721. Addison had passed away 
two years before, Swift was in Dublin, and Steele, 



Beturn to DuUin. 119 

broken in health and fortune, was in retirement in 
the country. But Pope invited him to Twickenham. 
Arbuthnot was to be found in London, and Atterbury 
at his deanery in Westminster, or in his country re- 
treat at Bromley. Clarke was still preaching sermons 
on philosophical theology in St James's. Sherlock was 
Master of the Temple, and Butler was delivering his 
sombre moral dissertations in the Chapel at the EoUs. 

In autumn Berkeley returned, after an absence of 
more than eight years from Ireland, to his old academic 
home in Trinity College. The architectural Earl of 
Burlington had recommended him to the Duke of 
Grafton, the newly-appointed Lord-Lieutenant. It was 
in his thirty - seventh year that he thus revisited the 
scenes of his youth, ^ to resume work for a little as a 
tutor in his college, and perhaps to find some prefer- 
ment in the Irish Church. This was not for the sake of 
the preferment, but only as a means to the design of 
learned leisure, combined with philanthropy, in which 
he was now beginning to indulge. "I had no sooner 
set foot on shore," he ^vrote to Lord Percival from 
Dublin in October, " than I heard that the deanery of 
Dromore was vacant, with £500 a-year and a sinecure 
— a circumstance that recommends it to me beyond 
any preferment in the kingdom, though there are some 
deaneries of twice that value." Lord Percival used his 
interest with the Duke. In February his patent passed 
the great seal. A lawsuit interposed. The bishop of the 

1 He tells Lord Percival soon after his arrival that he "wrote the 
Latin inscription on the king's equestrian statue," which had been 
uncovered a few days before. 



120 Berkeley, 

diocese claimed the nomination. With characteristic 
eagerness Berkeley employed " eight lawyers," being 
assured that " the expense will be several hundreds, and 
that against one in possession of the deanery, who has 
been practised in lawsuits for twenty-five years." Twelve 
months after this he was again in London for weeks, 
^^to see friends and to inform himself on some points 
of law which are not so well known in Ireland." He 
was nearly lost on this occasion in crossing to Holyhead. 

The new enterprise which had gradually fired his 
imagination became now the chief spring of action. It 
was thus disclosed in March 1723, in a letter from 
London to Lord Percival, who was then at Bath : — 

" It is now about ten months since I have determined 
to spend the residue of my days in Bermuda, where I 
trust in Providence I may be the mean instrument of 
doing great good to mankind. . . . The reforma- 
tion of manners among the English in our Western 
plantations, and the propagation of the Gospel among 
the American savages, are two points of high moment. 
The natural way of doing this is by founding a college 
or seminary in some convenient part of the West Indies, 
where the English youth of our plantations may be edu- 
cated in such sort as to supply their churches with pas- 
tors of good morals and good learning — a thing (God 
knows) much wanted. In the same seminary a number of 
young American savages may also be educated till they 
have taken the degree of Master of Arts. And being 
by that time well instructed in the Christian religion, 
practical mathematics, and other liberal arts and sciences, 
and early imbued with public-spirited principles and in- 
clinations, they may become the fittest instruments for 



A Bright Vision. 121 

spreading religion, morals, and civil life among their 
countrymen, who can entertain no suspicion or jealousy 
of men of their own blood and language, as they might 
do of English missionaries, who can never be well quali- 
fied for that work." He then goes on to describe the 
plans of education for American youth which he had 
conceived, gives his reasons for preferring the Bermuda 
or Summer Islands for the college, and presents the 
bright vision of an academic home in those fair lands 
of the West, whose idyllic bliss poets had sung, and 
from which Christian civilisation might now be made to 
radiate over the vast continent of America, with its mag- 
nificent possibilities in the future history of the race of 
man. He sees before him, in these Summer Islands, 
under a halo of romance, an Arcadia with its constant 
spring, nature in its gentlest moods, verdant fields and 
groves of palms, and cool ocean breezes; a people of 
simple manners, and without the enriching commodities 
which turn men away from academic pursuits ; and all 
so placed geographically as to be fitted to spread religion 
and learning, in a spiritual commerce, over the western 
regions of the world. 

We are left to conjecture the origin in Berkeley's 
imagination of this bright vision which so suddenly 
arose. According to his own account, it had occurred 
to him ten months before he wrote this letter, — our 
earliest intimation of it. That carries us back to his 
first months at Trinity CoUege, after his long absence in 
Italy and England, when his thoughts were still full of 
the social revelations that followed the South Sea dis- 
aster. That despair about Great Britain led him to look 
westward for the future course of empire, one cannot 



122 Berkeley. 

confidently affirm; but we know at least that his thoughts 
in the present year had been much diverted from Matter, 
Space, Time, and Motion, to the problems of human 
life in society. America was then, for the philanthropic 
imagination, what India, China, and Japan are now. 
The growth of American empire since — and of Britain, 
too, whose latent powers Berkeley so underrated in his 
'Essay' — might well have then filled the prophetic 
fancy of a seer to whose vision was disclosed a future 
history of mankind largely under the guidance of the 
English race. Berkeley seemed to see a better Eepublic 
than Plato's, and a grander Utopia than More's, as the 
issue of his ideal university in those Summer Isles of 
which Waller had sung. 

The social vision did not divert him from his law- 
suit, which indeed was undertaken only to help the realisa- 
tion of the vision. In May 1724 it was still undecided, 
but, through the good offices of Lady Percival, a more 
valuable preferment was then conferred upon him. "Yes- 
terday," he writes, " I received my Patent for the best 
deanery in this kingdom, that of Derry. It is said to be 
worth XI 500 per annum, but I do not consider it with a 
view to enriching myself. I shaU. be perfectly contented 
if it facilitates and recommends my scheme of Bermuda." 

In the meantime curious fortune had favoured him in 
an unexpected way. Swift's unhappy Vanessa, last en- 
countered by us in Bury Street, was settled on her pro- 
perty at Marley Abbey, ten miles from Dublin, after the 
death of her mother, Mrs Yanhomrigh, in 1717. Swift 
in the meantime had privately married Stella, as she 
confessed to Vanessa, who thereupon revoked the be- 
quest of her fortune to Swift, and left her estate to 



i 



Curious Fortune. 123 

be divided between Berkeley (whom sfie knew only by 
report), and Mr Marshall, afterwards an Irish judge. 
The unhappy lady died broken-hearted in May 1723. 
A few days afterwards Berkeley wrote to Lord Perci- 
val : " Here is something that will surprise your lord- 
ship, as it doth me. Mrs Hester Vanhomrigh, a lady 
to whom I was a perfect stranger, having never in the 
whole course of my life exchanged a word with her, 
died on Sunday night. Yesterday her will was opened, 
by which it appears that I am constituted executor, the 
advantage whereof is computed by those who understand 
her affairs to be worth £3000; — if a suit she had be 
carried, it will be considerably more. ... I know not 
what your thoughts are on the long account I sent you 
from London to Bath of my Bermuda scheme, which is 
now stronger on my mind than ever, this providential 
event having made many things easy in my private affairs 
which were otherwise before." Lord Percival in his re- 
ply concluded that he would "now persist more than 
ever in the thoughts of settling in Bermuda, and pro- 
secute that noble scheme, which, if favoured by our Court, 
may," he added, " in some time exalt your name beyond 
that of St Xavier or the most famous missionaries 
abroad." He warned him, however, that " without the 
protection of Government " he would have to encounter 
insurmountable difficulties in the West. 

The Vanessa legacy — with the obstructions to a settle- 
ment — was the theme of many letters about this time to 
his friend, Tom Prior. Most of the extant letters to 
Prior were written in 1724 and the three following years. ^ 
Though they illustrate some points in his character, they 
1 See 'Works,' vol. iv. pp. 110-152. 



124 Berheley, 

have no philosophical interest. The debts of Vanessa 
absorbed much of the fortune. "I am still likely to 
make £2000 clear," he writes/ "not reckoning on the 
lawsuit depending between the executors and Mrs 
Partington. As to the deanery of Dromore, I despair 
of seeing it end to my advantage. The truth is, my 
first purpose of going to Bermuda sets me above solicit- 
ing anything with earnestness in this part of the world. 
It can be of no use to me, but as it may enable me 
the better to prosecute that design; and it must be 
owned that the present possession of something in the 
Church would make my application for an establish- 
ment in those islands more considered. I mean the 
charter for a college there, which of all things I desire, 
as being what would reconcile duty and inclination, 
making my life at once more useful to the public, and 
more agreeable to myself, than I can possibly expect 
elsewhere." 

He got the wished-for deanery at last, and was thus 
advanced a step towards Bermuda. "Yesterday," he 
writes in May 1724, " I received my patent for the best 
deanery in this kingdom, that of Derry." E"ext month 
he went to visit his new possession. He was charmed with 
Londonderry. "The walls with walks round, planted 
with trees, are like those of Padua. I have hardly seen 
a more agreeable situation, much gusto grande in the 
laying out this whole country, which recalls to my mind 
many prospects of N^aples and Sicily. I may chance 
not to be twopence richer for the preferment; for by 
the time I have paid for the house and first-fruits, I 
hope I shall have brought the Bermuda project to an 
^ September 19, 1723— Percival MSS. 



"A Life academicO'pMlosophicaU' 125 

issue, which, God willing, is to be my employment this 
winter in London." ^ 

To London, accordingly, he went in September, to 
raise funds and obtain a charter from the king, fortified 
by a letter from Swift, then in Dublin, recommending 
him to Lord Carteret at Bath, who was coming over to 
succeed the Duke of Grafton as Lord Lieutenant. Swift 
was as cordial as ever, and bore him no ill-will on ac- 
count of the Vanessa affair. In this remarkable letter 
he thus describes Berkeley's previous career and present 
mission : — 

" Going to England very young, about thirteen years ago, 
the bearer of this became founder of a sect called the Im- 
materialists, by the force of a very curious book upon 
that subject. . . . He is an absolute philosopher with re- 
gard to money, titles, and power ; and for three years past 
has been struck with a notion of founding a university at 
Bermudas, by a charter from the Crown. He has seduced 
several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, 
many of them well provided for, and all in the fairest way for 
preferment ; but in England his conquests are greater, and 
I doubt will spread very far this winter. He showed me 
a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your 
Excellency will see his whole scheme of a hfe academico- 
philosophical, of a college founded for Indian scholars and 
missionaries ; where he most exorbitantly proposes a whole 
hundred pounds a-year for himself. . . . His heart will 
break if his deanery be not taken from him, and left to 
your Excellency's disposal. I discouraged him by the cold- 
ness of Courts and Ministers, who will interpret all this as 
impossible and a vision ; but nothing mil do." ^ 



1 June 8, 1724— Percival MSS. In the same letter he says, " I 
have farmed out my lands for £1250 a-year, but am assured they are 
worth £200 more." 

2 'Works,' vol. iv. p. 102. 



126 Berkeley. 

As Swift had predicted, his conquests spread far and 
fast in England. Nothing shows more the magic of 
Berkeley's presence and influence than the history of 
this reception in London. The scheme met with en- 
couragement from all sorts of people, in a generation 
represented by Sir Eobert Walpole. The subscriptions 
soon reached .£5000, and the list included Sir Eobert 
Walpole himself. The members of the Scriblerus Club 
being met at Lord Bathurst's house at -dinner, they agreed 
to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his Ber- 
muda scheme. Having listened to the many lively 
things the party had to say, he begged to be heard in 
his turn, and " displayed his plan with such an astonish- 
ing and amazing force of eloquence and enthusiasm that 
they were struck dumb, and after some pause, rose all 
up together, with earnestness exclaiming, 'Let us set 
out with him immediately.^ '' ^ Bermuda was the fashion 
among the wits of London, and Bolingbroke wrote to 
Swift that he would "gladly exchange Europe for its 
charms, only not in a missionary capacity." 

Berkeley was not satisfied with subscriptions, and 
remembered what Lord Percival had said about the 
protection and aid of Government. He interceded with 
George the Eirst, and obtained royal encouragement to 
hope for a grant of £20,000, to endow the Bermuda 
College, out of the purchase money of St Christopher, 
given to England by the Treaty of Utrecht. He can- 
vassed every member of both Houses. The vote was 
carried in the House of Commons with only two dis- 
sentient voices, in May 1726. Walpole, while he did 
not oppose, hoped that the bill would be thrown out, 
1 Warton's * Essay on Pope/ vol. ii. p. 254. 



A London Lion. 127 

and secretly resolved that it should come to nothing in 
the end. I'or the four years which followed September 
1724, Berkeley lived in London, negotiating and other- 
wise forwarding this enterprise of social idealism. Lon- 
don was his home now for the third time. It was in 
these years that he used to attend the Court of Caro- 
line, at Leicester Fields, when she was Princess of 
Wales ; and afterwards at St James's, or at Kensington, 
when in 1727 she became the Queen-Consort of George 
the Second — not, he says, because he loved Courts, but 
because he loved America. Clarke was still in London, 
but Butler had gone into the seclusion of his Stanhope 
rectory. Voltaire, then unknown to fame, was on a 
visit to England, and mentions that he met "the dis- 
coverer of the true theory of vision," when he was in 
London in 1726. The Queen, as all know, was fond 
of theological and philosophical discussion. Ten years 
before, when Princess of Wales, she had been a royal 
go-between in the famous philosophical correspondence 
between Clarke and Leibnitz. And now, with Berkeley 
in London, she was glad to include him along with 
Clarke, Sherlock, and Hoadley at her weekly reunions, 
and to hear Hoadley supporting Clarke, and Sherlock 
arguing for Berkeley. "He was idolised in England 
before he set off for America. He used to go to St 
James's two days a-week to dispute with Dr Samuel 
Clarke before Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales, 
and had a magnificent gold medal presented to him by 
George the Second ; but he complained of the drudgery 
of taking part in these useless disputes." ^ 

1 Preface to the ^ Literary Eelics of George Monck Berkeley ' 
(1789). 



128 Berkeley. 

At last his patience was rewarded. In September 
1728 we all of a sudden find him at Greenwich, newly 
married too, and about to sail for Ehode Island, on his 
" mission of godlike benevolence." " To-morrow," he 
writes on the 3d of September to Lord Percival, "we 
sail down the river. Mr James and Mr Dalton go with 
me ; so doth my wife, a daughter of the late Chief- 
Justice Forster, whom I married since I saw your lord- 
ship. I chose her for her qualities of mind, and her 
unaffected inclination to books. She goes with great 
thankfulness, to live a plain farmer's life, and wear stuff 
of her own spinning. I have presented her with a 
spinning-wheel. Her fortune was <£2000 originally, but 
travelling and exchange have reduced it to less than 
£1500 English money. I have placed that, and about 
<£600 of my own, in South Sea annuities." We are 
told that the young wife was disposed to mystical 
quietism, and that Fenelon and Madame Guyon were 
her favourite characters. 

Berkeley was in his forty-fourth year, when, in deep 
devotion to his Ideal, and full of glowing visions of a 
Fifth Empire in the West, he sailed for Ehode Island 
as the pioneer of the enterprise, with the promise of Sir 
Eobert Walpole that the parliamentary grant should be 
paid as soon as he had made the necessary investments. 
He bought land in America, and lived there for nearly 
three years, but he never saw the Islands that had 
touched his imagination. 



129 



CHAPTER III. 

RECLUSE LIFE IN RHODE ISLAND. 

Towards the end of January in 1729, the "hked ship of 
250 tons," in which Berkeley and his party sailed from 
the Thames, appeared in the iN'arragansett waters, on the 
western shore of Ehode Island, and landed them in the 
harbour at ISTewport. They had touched at Virginia on 
their way, where he '^received many honours from the 
governor and the principal inhabitants," after they had 
been, he writes,^ "a long time blundering about the ocean." 
The 'I^ew England Courier' of the day gives this 
picture of the disembarkation at ISTewport : " Yesterday 
arrived here Dean Berkeley of Londonderry. He is a 
gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, 
and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with 
a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved 
himself after a very complaisant manner." Writing to 
Percival a few days after his arrival, he says he was 
"never more agreeably surprised than at the sight of 
the town and harbour of Newport. There is a more 
probable prospect of doing good here than in any other 
part of the world ; were it in my power I should not 

1 February 7, 1729- Percival MSS. 
P. — III. I 



130 Berkeley, 

demur about situating our college here. Eut no step 
can be taken herein without the consent of the Crown." 
Around him at Newport was some of the softest rural 
and grandest ocean scenery in the world, which had 
fresh charms even for one whose childhood was spent 
in the vale of the INTore, who was familiar with rural 
England, had lingered at Naples and at Ischia, and wan- 
dered among the mountains of Sicily. 

The island in which Berkeley found himself on that 
January day is about fifteen miles long and four or five 
broad. It was his home during three years of waiting 
for the fulfilment of the promise on the faith of which 
he left England. It is about seventy miles from Boston, 
and also about seventy miles from Ne^^haven and Yale 
College. The Indians called it the Isle of Peace. A 
ridge of hills crosses the centre, from which pleasant 
meadows slope to a rocky shore. The air is balmy, 
with gorgeous sunsets in summer and autumn, and the 
Gulf Stream tempers the surrounding seas. It con- 
tained about 15,000 inhabitants, including about 1500 
negro slaves. The climate attracted visitors from the 
mainland and from the West Indies ; while the toler- 
ation which reigned within the little society made it 
then in America what Holland had long been in Europe. 
The people, he writes,^ " are industrious, and though less 
orthodox have not less vh^tue, and I am sure they have 
more regularity than those I left in Europe. They are 
indeed a strange medley of different persuasions, which 
nevertheless do all agree in one point, — that the Church 
of England is the second best." The Ehode Island 
gentry of that day preserved the customs of the squires 
1 March 28, 1729-Percival MSS. 



A Rural Home, 131 

in the old country, from whom they were descended ; 
for tradition speaks of a cheerful society. The fox-chase 
with hounds and horns, as well as fishing and fowling, 
were favourite sports in I^arragansett. 

In the summer after his arrival, Berkeley and his 
wife moved from JSTewport to a sequestered valley in the 
interior of the island, where he bought a farm and built 
a house. He named this island -home Whitehall, in 
loyal remembrance of the palace of the monarchs of 
England. Here he began domestic life, and became the 
father of a family. The house may still be seen near a hill 
which commands a wide view of land and ocean. The 
neighbouring groves, and the rocks that skirt the coast, 
offered the shade and silence and solitude that soothed 
him in his recluse life. The friends with whom he had 
crossed the ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solicita- 
tions could withdraw him from the quiet of his island- 
home. " After my long fatigue of business," he wrote to 
Lord Percival,^ " this retirement is very agreeable to me ; 
and my wife loves a country life and books, as well as 
to pass her time continually and cheerfully without any 
other conversation than her husband and the dead." 
Till now he had lived in Trinity College, or in hired 
apartments in London and in Italy. At Whitehall he 
was better placed for meditative work than since he first 
left Dublin in 1713, and he had one to share his life 
whose sympathy was with mystic quietism and Fenelon. 

Though Berkeley loved the peace of this rural home, 

and the ^' still air of delightful studies," he mixed in the 

society of JSTe^vport, with its lawyers, physicians, and 

enterprising merchants, some of whom had been trained 

1 March 29, 1730— Percival MSS. 



132 Berkeley, 

in the universities of Europe. He helped to form ^ 
philosophical reunion there, and found persons who 
could understand how his new conception of outward 
things implied no distrust of the eyes and hands, nor 
disregard of common-sense in the conduct of life. 

He appears in Ehode Island as an ingenious student 
more than as the aggressive leader, resolved upon the 
success of an apostolic mission. We find him much 
among his books, often at a favourite retreat below a 
]3rojecting rock which commanded a view of the beach 
and the ocean — seldom out of the island-home, to no 
extent a traveller on the continent of America, gather- 
ing experience and organising plans. The "eloquence 
and enthusiasm " which years before carried away Lord 
Bathurst and his friends, seem diverted now from out- 
ward action to meditation on the philosophical founda- 
tions of theology, but always with moral and human 
ends in view. This sort of life was probably, after all, 
more according to his disposition. 

From the first he had so planned his enterprise that 
it was at the mercy of Sir Eobert Walpole. The pros- 
pects, which were doubtful when he left England, 
darkened even to his sanguine eyes after he reached 
Ehode Island, which he soon began to prefer even to 
Bermuda for his college. " The truth is,'' he told Lord 
Percival in the June after he landed,^ " I am not in my 
own power, not being at liberty to act without the con- 
currence as well of the Ministry as of my associates. 
I cannot therefore place the college where I please ; and 
though on some accounts I did, and do still think, it 
would more probably be attended with success if placed 

1 Percival MSS. 



Disappointment. 133 

here rather than in Bermuda, yet if the Government 
and those engaged with me should persist in the old 
scheme, I am ready to go thither, and will do so as 
soon as I hear the money is received and my associates 
arrived. Before I left England I was reduced to a diffi- 
cult situation. Had I continued there, the report would 
have obtained (Avhich I had found beginning to spread) 
that I had dropped the design, after it had cost me and 
my friends so much trouble and expense. On the other 
hand, if I had taken leave of my friends, even those 
who assisted and approved my undertaking would have 
condemned my living abroad before the king's bounty 
was received. This obliged me to come away in the 
private manner that I did, and to run the risk of a tedi- 
ous winter voyage. JS'othing less could have convinced 
the world that I was in earnest." " I wait here," he 
writes to him a year later, " with all the anxiety that 
attends suspense, until I know what I can depend upon, 
and what course I am to take. I must own the disap- 
pointments I have met with have really touched me, not 
without much affecting my health and spirits. If the 
founding of a college for the spread of religion and 
learning in America had been a foolish project, it can- 
not be supposed the Court, the Ministers, and the Par- 
liament could have given such encouragement to it ; and 
if, after all that encouragement, they also engaged to 
endow and protect it lest it drop, the disappointment 
indeed may be to me, but the censure, I think, will 
light elsewhere." 

He had embarked to realise a beautiful vision, but by 
means which hardly commend themselves to ordinary 
men of the world, who could see only " a foolish pro- 



1 34 Berkeley, 

ject" in making, on the one hand, islands like the 
Bermudas, six hundred miles out in the Atlantic, or, 
on the other hand, Rhode Island, far from the chief 
Indian population, the basis of operations for the Chris- 
tian civilisation of America. The crisis of the enter- 
prise at last came. Sir Eobert Walpole had never en- 
tered into it. What must have seemed to him knight- 
errantry was not embraced in his scheme of policy. The 
presence in London of the enthusiastic leader of the 
expedition, four years before, had carried the grant 
through the House of Commons. But the ardent mis- 
sionary, with his action misconceived, was now a studi- 
ous recluse at Whitehall. " If you put the question to 
me as a Minister," Walpole at last said, early in 1730, 
" I must and can assure you that the money shall most 
undoubtedly be paid — as soon as suits with public con- 
venience ; but if you ask me as a friend whether Dean 
Berkeley should continue in America, expecting the 
payment of X2 0,000, I advise him by all means to re- 
turn to Europe, and to give up his present expecta- 
tions." "I do not wonder at your disappointment," 
Lord Percival said,^ in making this known to him. " The 
design was too great and good to be accomplished in an 
age when men love darkness better than the light, and 
where nothing is considered but with a political view. 
A very great lord asked me the other day whether I 
thought the Indians could not be saved as well as we ; 
and whether I had considered that learning tended to 
make the plantations independent of their mother coun- 
try ; adding that the ignorance of the Indians, and the 
variety of sects, was our best security. He was even 
1 December 23, 1730— Percival MSS. 



Samuel Johnson, 135 

sorry that we had a university in Dublin ; and yet this 
Lord is the ornament of the nobility for learning and 
sobriety, but he reduced all to policy." 

Berkeley's life in Ehode Island was the beginning of 
his return to study and philosophy. Those of his re- 
maining letters which are of most philosophic interest 
were written there ; and his ' Alciphron/ was prepared 
in the library at "Whitehall, or in a natural alcove under 
the Hanging Rocks near the shore. 

Soon after the arrival at Newport, he was visited by 
Samuel Johnson, the Episcopal missionary at Stratford, 
one of the most acute and learned men then to be found 
in America.^ Johnson had already made some ac- 
quaintance with Berkeley's writings on vision and on the 
material world, and was well-disposed to the theory that 
sight is foresight, and even that esse is percipi. Inter- 
course with their author by visits and correspondence 
confirmed this disposition. Explanations and vindica- 
tions of the new philosophical theory were proposed in 
letters to him from Whitehall. Johnson became an 
ardent convert, w^ho illustrated and applied to theology, 
in his own * Elementa Philosophica,' twenty years after- 
wards, the lessons he then learned. This intercourse 
with one whom he describes as " a man of parts and a 
philosophic genius," was one of Berkeley's chief pleasures 
in his studious seclusion. 

1 Johnson was afterwards president of King's College in New York. 
He died in 1772. A short account of him, by Dr Chandler, was 
published in 1824. We have now the large volume of his *Life and 
Correspondence,' by the Rev. Dr Beardsley (New York, 1874), which 
contains an interesting chapter on Berkeley, and some additional 
letters from his correspondence with Johnson. 



136 Berkeley, 

These Whitehall letters contain some interesting eluci- 
dations of what Berkeley thought about the hyper-phe- 
nomenal realities symbolised in the phenomenal things 
of sense ; also about space and time, abstract ideas, and 
the true meaning of causation. The following sentences 
in one of them point towards objective idealism : — 

" I have no objections against calling the Ideas in the mind 
of God archetypes of ours. But I object against those arche- 
types by philosophers supposed to be real things, and to have 
an absolute rational or intelligible existence distinct from 
their being perceived (or conceived) by any mind whatso- 
ever ; it being the opinion of all materialists that an ideal 
existence in the divine mind is one thing, and the real exist- 
ence of material things another." 

His view of what space and time mean is presented 
in some new lights in the sentences which follow : — 

"As to space, I have no notion of any but that which is 
relative. . . . Sir Isaac Newton supposeth an absolute space 
distinct from relative, and consequent thereto absolute motion 
distinct from relative motion ; and with all other mathema- 
ticians he supposeth the infinite divisibility of the finite 
parts of this absolute space : he also supposeth material 
bodies to drift therein. ... I cannot agree with him in 
these particulars. I make no scruple to use the word space 
as well as all other words in common use ; but I do not 
mean thereby a distinct absolute being. . . . By to vvv 
I suppose to be implied that all things past and to come are 
present to the mind of God, and that there is in Him no 
change, variation, or succession of time. A succession ol 
ideas I take to constitute time, and not to be only the sens- 
ible measure thereof, as Mr Locke and others think. But in 
these matters every one is to think for himself, and speak 
as he finds. One of my earliest inquiries was about Time, 
which led me into several paradoxes that I did not think fit 



Metaphysical Letters. 137 

or necessary to publish, particularly into the notion that the 
resurrection follows next moment to death. We are con- 
founded and perplexed about time (a) supposing a succession 
in God, (h) conceiving that we have an abstract idea of time, 
(c) supposing that time in one mind is to be measured by 
succession of ideas in another, {d) not considering the true 
end and use of words, which as often terminate in the will as 
in the understanding, being employed rather to excite influ- 
ence and divert action than to produce clear and distinct ideas." 

Here are some sentences on abstractions : — 

" Abstract general ideas was a notion that Mr Locke held 
in common with the schoolmen, and, I think, all other phil- 
osophers. It runs through his whole book of Human Un- 
derstanding. He holds an abstract idea of existence, exclu- 
sive of perceiving and being perceived. I cannot And I have 
any such idea, and this is my reason against it. ... I think 
it might prevent a good deal of obscurity and confusion to 
examine well what 1 have said about abstraction, and about 
the true use and significancy of words, in several parts of 
these things that I have published, though much remains to 
be said on that subject. You say you agree with me that 
there is nothing within your mind [i.e., knowable] but God 
and other spirits, with the attributes or properties belonging 
to them ; and the ideas contained in them [i.e., the pheno- 
menal things present to them]. This is a principle from 
which, and from what I have laid down about abstract ideas, 
much may be deduced." 

What follows on causality is important : — 

" Mechanical philosophy does not assign any one natural 
efficient cause, in the proper sense of causality ; nor is it, as 
to its use, concerned at all about [substantial or hyper-phe- 
nomenal] Matter. . . . Cause is taken in different senses. 
A proper, active, efficient cause I can conceive none but 
Spirit ; nor action but where there is Will. But this doth 
not hinder the allomng occasional causes [caused or pheno- 



138 Berkeley, 

menal causes], whicli are in trutli but signs; and more is 
not requisite in tlie best physics. Neither doth it hinder 
the admitting other [free or uncaused and unphenomenal] 
causes besides God ; such as [finite] spirits of different 
orders, which may be termed active causes, as acting indeed, 
though by limited and derivative powers. As for an un- 
thinking agent, no point of physics is explained by it, nor 
is it conceivable. That the divine conservation of sensible 
things is the same thing with a continued creation was a 
common opinion of the schoolmen and others. . . . The 
very poets teach a doctrine not unlike the schools — mens 
agitat molem. The Stoics and Platonists are full of the same 
notion. I am not therefore singular in this point itself so 
much as in my way of pro\dng it. . . . As to guilt, it is the 
same thing whether I kill a man with my hands or by an 
instrument. The imputation, therefore, upon the sanctity 
of God, is equally, whether we suppose our sensations [i.e., 
phenomenal things] to be produced immediately by God, or 
by the mediation of subordinate [i. e., phenomenal] causes, 
which are all His creatures and moved by His laws. This 
theological consideration is beside the question ; for such I 
hold all points to be which bear equally hard on both sides 
of it. Difficulties about the principle of moral actions will 
cease if we consider that all guilt is in the [causal — i.e., 
free] will, and that our ideas [i.e., the phenomena of which 
we are percipient in the senses], from whatever cause they 
are produced [i.e., whether it be God or unphenomenal Mat- 
ter], are alike inert." ^ 

New England at this time possessed, in Jonathan 
Edwards, the most subtle metaphysical reasoner that 

1 This consists with the faith that unphenomenal or free causation 
is given to us in our moral consciousness of our own spiritual in- 
dividuality and responsible agency. As nothing analogous to this 
is found in sense, or representable in imagination, phenomenal caus- 
ation only (which properly is not causation at all) is discoverable in 
the world of sense. 



Jonathan Edwards. 139 

America has ever produced. Edwards represents the 
genius of Puritan religion in the highest sphere of ab- 
stract thought, as Bunyan and Milton represent it in the 
world of creative imagination. Though he does not name 
Berkeley, his writings show that he adopted his con- 
ception of the material world and its laws. This famous 
Calvinistic thinker was one of Johnson's pupils at Yale 
College, or living a life of devout meditation on the 
bank of the Hudson river, when Berkeley was in Ehode 
Island. Edwards's ' Freedom of the Will ' did not 
appear till 1754. It is in earlier writings that his 
metaphysical conclusions about matter are to be found. 
The "universal necessity" of Edwards was foreign to 
the thought of Berkeley, whose recognition of moral, 
and therefore independent, agency and power in finite 
spirits, saved him from conclusions avowed by Spi- 
noza, and logically implied by Malebranche and by the 
American Puritan. Edwards, however, defended the 
conclusion that the objects of our sensuous perceptions 
can have no actual and intelligible existence abstract- 
ed from the sense - experience of a spirit. He also 
argued that, although the phenomena of which things 
consist, and the laws that regulate these phenomena, are 
not originated by men, but by a power external to all 
human minds — that power cannot be a mindless sub- 
stance, but must be the reason and will of God. The 
phenomena of sense are thus signs of thoughts, which 
are communicated to finite minds by God's will, in 
whom things move and have their being and consist. 
The world is a phenomenal one ; but the laws of the 
coexistence and the succession of its phenomena are 
steady and rational. To suppose the universe exist- 



140 Berkeley, 

ing in this way does not, Edwards sees, in the least 
affect the stability of physical science. The vulgar 
objection of the want of persistence in sensible things, 
on the immaterialist hypothesis as to what is meant by 
their "reality," he answers in an ingenious manner, 
showing his belief in their want of independent sub- 
stance and power. The " substance " of bodies, when 
the word is so applied at all, with him only means 
" the infinitely exact and precise divine Idea, together 
with an unwaverable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable 
Will, with respect to corresponding communications to 
created minds, and effects on their minds." The objec- 
tion that all this contradicts '' common-sense " he en- 
counters by showing the absurdity of the common 
opinion, that we can perceive distant things, and by 
contrasting our visual with our tactual perceptions. 
Withdraw from anything its colour, and other second- 
ary, which, by consent of all, are sense-dependent quali- 
ties ; think of them as a person born blind must do. 
All we can then be conscious of is a blind feeling of 
resistance. Every one who reflects must therefore allow 
that bodies are at any rate very different from what they 
are supposed to be, in the assumptions of ordinary 
unreflecting common-sense. It is thus that Edwards 
paves the way to his general conclusions — that the 
only substance in the universe is and must be spirit- 
ual, in which he coincides with Berkeley ; and that the 
only causes in existence, "bodily or spiritual," must 
themselves be effects or caused causes, in which he fun- 
damentally differs from Berkeley. Whether Edwards 
drew his thoughts from Berkeley's early writings at first 
hand, or through Johnson, is uncertain ; but it is a fact 



American Uw.joire, 141 

worthy of remembrance, that Berkeley\s new thought 
about things — though not about persons and personal 
freedom — was also the thought of the most metaphysical 
mind in America.^ 

Berkeley, with his wife and their infant son, bade 
farewell to America in the autumn of 1731.^ They sailed 
from Eoston in October, and reached London in January. 

Thus ended the romantic episode of Ehode Island, 
which warms the heart and affects the imagination more 
perhaps than any other incident even in Berkeley's life. 
Of all who have ever landed on the American shore, none 
was animated by a more unworldly spirit. The country 
in which and for which he lived now acknowledges that 
in his visit it was touched by the halo of an illustrious 
reputation. His dream of future American Empire has 
not been without its influence in promoting its own ful- 
filment in these latter times. 

" Westward the course of Empire takes its way ; 
The four first Acts already past : 
A fifth shall close the Drama A^dth the day ; 
Time's noblest offspring is the last."' 



1 I am glad to be able to refer, in confirmation of the statement in 
tlie textj that Edwards was a Berkeleyan — hazarded also in my 
edition of Berkeley's Works — to the authority of the learned Pro- 
fessor Fisher of Yale College, in his ' Discussions in History and 
Theology' (New York, 1880). This volume contains a valuable 
essay on " The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards," pp. 227-252. 

2 An infant daughter died at Whitehall a few days before they 
left it. 



142 



CHAPTEE IV. 

CONTROVERSIAL AUTHORSHIP. 

Berkeley lived for more than two years in London after 
his return from America. This fifth and last time in 
which he made London his home was marked by his 
reappearance as a philosophical author, after the in- 
effectual endeavour to realise a grand social ideal which 
had consumed the ten best years of his life. So it hap- 
pened that his restless middle age closed with contribu- 
tions to the literature of philosophy, as his early Hfe in 
Ireland had done twenty years before. This fresh issue 
of books bore traces of his surroundings at the time. 

Indisposition to society and indifferent health were 
now apparent. Even before he left Ehode Island there 
were signs of a less buoyant spirit, and already, at the age 
of forty-seven, of approaching old age. His constitution 
was never very robust, burdened as it was by the eager 
impetuous temperament. 

The London to which he returned contained almost 
none of those with whom he had been brought into con- 
nection at the brilliant social gatherings of former years. 
Samuel Clarke and his antagonist Anthony CoUins 
both died in the year in which Berkeley sailed from 



London. 143 

the Thames. Swift had left London for ever, and 
Steele had followed Addison to the grave. Gay, the 
friend of Berkeley and Pope, died about the time of 
the return from America, and Arbuthnot was approach- 
ing his end at Hampstead. Butler was buried in the 
deep seclusion of his northern rectory at Stanhope, pon- 
dering the thoughts which four years later found expres- 
sion in the 'Analogy.' But Pope was still at Twicken- 
ham, busy with his 'Essay on Man,' receiving visits 
from Bolingbroke, or visiting Lord Bathurst at Ciren- 
cester Park. Berkeley's instruction to his American 
correspondent Samuel Johnson, to direct his letters "to 
Lord Percival's, at his house in Pall Mall," shows con- 
tinued intimacy with his early patron, w^ho had been 
his correspondent for a quarter of a century. Once or 
twice, " in obedience to the Queen's command," he 
attended as of old at Court, '' to discourse with her 
Majesty on what he had observed worthy of notice in 
America." 

The immediate occasion of this return to philosophical 
authorship was the increase of scepticism about religion. 
To vanquish the free-thinkers was, according to J. S. Mill, 
"the leading purpose of Berkeley's career as a philoso- 
pher." It would be nearer the truth to say that it was the 
purpose of his authorship in middle life. The pervading 
intellectual and moral outcome of his life as a whole was 
— to awaken our common consciousness of the Eternal 
Spirit or Reason, concealed yet revealed in the sensuous 
phantasmagoria — the true and deep reality, symbolised 
by the phenomenal things of sense in their very consti- 
tution. Instead of Eternal Spirit or Reason, unintelli- 
gible Matter and Force — blind or non-rational, and there- 



144 Berkeley, 

fore untrustworthy — was the only "God" he found in 
the teaching of Toland and Collins, who arrogated to 
themselves the honourable title of free-thinkers. With- 
out explaining indeed what he means by atheism, he as- 
sured himself that Collins was an " atheist \ " and also 
that the selfish and sensuous utilitarianism of Mande- 
ville, and even the sentimental ethics of Shaftesbury, 
to both of which he had a strong dislike, were con- 
sequences of concealed atheism. That the main cur- 
rent of thought among the self-styled "free-thinkers" 
of the time was a sort of materialistic fatalism, incon- 
sistent with the supremacy of Eeason and Goodness in 
the universe, he took for granted in the controversial 
writings which belong to this period of his life. He 
connected it, too, with the contemptuous outcry against 
theology, as based on faith in mere mysteries, which was 
countenanced by some contemporary mathematicians and 
natural philosophers. 

The fervid impatience natural to Berkeley was apt to 
blind him in some degree to the wide scope of the ques- 
tions underlying the argumentative criticism of contem- 
porary free-thinkers, though, in a great measure imcon- 
sciously to themselves. For they gave currency, in a 
popular fashion, to consequences of principles contained 
in the then obscure and forgotten books of Spinoza ;^ and 
to others that were afterwards involved in the searching 
scepticism of Hume, and even in the later rationalism of 
Germany. With his subject in clear outline, in a trans- 
parent atmosphere of thought, at his own point of view, 
there may be found in Berkeley's confident polemic, by 

1 See Mr Frederick Pollock's masterly treatise on ' Spinoza : his 
Life and Philosophy ' (1880), pp. 381-384. 



" Minute Philosophers" 145 

those familiar with Spinoza and Hume, a want of that 
large intellectual grasp which adequately comprehends 
the speculative difficulties of an intellectual system of 
the universe. There is along with this perhaps an in- 
sufficient sense of its sublime and awful mystery ; and 
it must be confessed that he now and then approaches 
too near the tone of sectarian controversy. 

He had been reading in Ehode Island what free- 
thinkers in England were writing, and his repeated resi- 
dences in London had made him personally familiar with 
theological sceptics. The result of the reading and the 
personal intercom^se, and of meditation upon both, ap- 
peared in 'Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher,' writ- 
ten in Ehode Island, and published soon after his arrival 
in London. This is the largest, and was at the time of its 
first appearance the most popular, of all Berkeley's books. 
It is a philosophical argument for religion, offered about 
the time when, according to Bishop Butler, it had "come 
to be taken for granted that Christianity is not so much 
as a subject for inquiry, but that it is now at length dis- 
covered to be fictitious; and nothing remained but to set 
it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule, as it 
were by way of reprisals, for its having so long inter- 
rupted the pleasures of the world." ^ Berkeley's polemic 
is in the form of dialogues that are more fitted than any 
in our language to enable the English reader to under- 
stand the charm of Cicero and Plato. The " minute phi- 
losophers " are the English free-thinkers ; the argument 
is directed to restore theological beliefs, and, on grounds 
of reason, to sustain faith in the divinity of that order 
of which nature and physical law are the embodiment. 

1 Butler's ' Analogy ' — Advertisement. 
P. — III. K 



146 Berkeley. 

There is more appearance of learning in ' Alciphron ' 
than in any of Berkeley's earlier works. Authorities, 
ancient and modern, are frequently cited, with allu- 
sions which imply greater familiarity than formerly with 
literature, and a more extensive observation of life. The 
appeals to the imagination in the way of rural pictures 
are characteristic, and in some parts the dialogue has all 
the charm and sentiment of a pastoral poem. Its artistic 
features are due to its author's stay in Rhode Island, for 
the pictures were suggested by scenes around White- 
hall; and the reader is thus often carried back to the 
green vales and ocean shores, with which the writer was 
familiar in that Arcadia. 

* Alciphron' consists of seven dialogues. The first 
opens the discussion; in the second and third, ques- 
tions of ethics are debated ; the fourth argues the per- 
petual providence and supremacy of constantly creating 
Mind in the very constitution of visible things, and the 
existence of divine law in nature ; in the three last, the 
spiritual and civilising advantages of religion, as well as 
objections to it on account of its ultimate mysterious- 
ness, are considered. Subtle intellect is employed in 
defending a more generous morality against selfish ethical 
theories, founded on organic pleasure and pain, like 
Mandeville's ; or on enthusiastic sentiment like Shaftes- 
bury's ; while the new thought about the sort of reality 
that belongs to sensible things is applied in vindication 
of theism, and to meet objections to the practical quick- 
ening of theistic beliefs by the historical facts of Chris- 
tianity. The utility — in the wide meaning of utility — 
of virtue, and of faith in the continued life of moral 
agents after the dissolution of the organism of the body; 



The Seven Dialogues, 147 

the sufficiency of the evidence of religion for the de- 
mands of practical reason ; with the inevitableness and 
utility of the mysterious terms which symbolise religious 
thought — are some of the questions raised for settlement. 

Among the interlocutors Alciphron and Lysicles rep- 
resent "minute philosophy," — the former in its more 
intellectual and generous aspect; the latter as adopted 
by shallow men of the world, who live for transitory 
pleasures. Euphranor and Crito advocate morality and 
religion ; Dion is mostly a spectator. 

In the first dialogue the party try to find some com- 
mon principles applicable to disputed questions in moral- 
ity and religion ; and in the end Alciphron is made to 
confess that all beliefs that are indispensable to the com- 
mon weal are natural, and therefore true, rules for human 
action. He had before tried to show that the only real 
constituents of human nature, in which all men are prac- 
tically agreed, are the pleasures and pains of the body ; 
and that faith in a morality transcending sensuous phe- 
nomena and then pleasures — faith in God or the suprem- 
acy of moral government — and faith in the continued 
life of moral agents after the death of the body, — have 
been artificially produced and sustained, not being always 
and originally acknowledged by men. Yet he has in 
the end to allow that beliefs which may make no appear- 
ance in early life, or which are not reached at all in the 
experience of many men, may still be latent in the 
constitution of man. It may in this way belong to our 
original constitution that each of us should be obliged 
to consider his own individuality as included in a social 
whole — -to the common good of which he is bound to 
contribute, if he would live according to the genuine, 



148 Berkeley. 

though it may be often the latent, nature of humanity. 
So the question in the remaining dialogues resolves into 
this : Have beliefs in the supremacy of the divine 
order or physical Providence, and in the future life 
of moral agents — which free-thinkers abandon — a ten- 
dency to promote the highest good of men 1 Are they 
in this respect in harmony with, and required for, the 
satisfaction of human nature 1 

Mandeville's ' Fable of the Bees,' with its ambiguous 
generalisation — "private vices, public benefits" — is the 
particular object of criticism in the second dialogue; 
and it is argued that there are ascertainable differences 
in kind among the pleasures of which men are capable. 
The moral theory of Shaftesbury is taken up by the 
interlocutors in their next discussion, with its analogy 
between conscience and taste, and its disparagement of 
a faith in the future that is grounded on the present 
inequality of rewards and punishments, as a faith apt to 
minister to selfishness, and to foster an ignoble spirit. 
The opposed argument is, that this enthusiastic morality 
is unsuited to human nature, which needs a firmer mo- 
tive than romantic sentiment, and has to be sustained by 
an appeal to the complex elements of our constitution. 

But Alciphron is not satisfied with evidence that 
belief in God, and in divine realities deeper than sense, 
is advantageous to society. That a belief is consolatory, 
and that its decay introduces despair and misery, does 
not show that it is true. The question that has really 
to be met is this : Are we obliged, on grounds of reason, 
to believe that God exists ; or do we even know what 
we mean, when we affirm God's existence, and use this 
mysterious name ? The visual immaterialism of Berke- 



A Visible God. 149 

ley is introduced to help the answer to this question, 
Euphranor and Crito maintain that, as the visible world 
can have no independent existence, being merely the phe- 
nomenal expression of Intelligence and Will, we have in 
its constitution or intelligibility the same kind of proof 
that God exists that we have of the existence of a fellow- 
man, when we watch phenomenal expressions of his 
existence, in his calculated actions and reasonable speech. 
This sort of theological knowledge, the argument further 
urges, is not merely negative and analogical, as Arch- 
bishop King and Bishop Browne, as well as the free- 
thinkers, had maintained that all theological knowledge 
must be. We are not obliged to worship an unknown 
and unknowable God ; for we see in visible phenomena 
and phenomenal things the acting of intelligent Spirit, 
similar to what we are conscious of in ourselves, and to 
what we recognise through the mediation of sight in 
our fellow-men. 

The theological way of thinking about the universe 
would thus be true free-thought, and a life correspond- 
ing to it the ideal of human nature. Eeligious faith 
would be the perfection of man — intellectual or philoso- 
phical ; a corresponding practice would be the perfection 
of man — seeking to realise his ideal of duty. 

If Berkeley did not fully fathom the deep and complex 
questions involved in this conclusion, his own argument 
in these dialogues was a mystery to the free-thinkers 
of his time. " ^ Alciphron ' is hard to be understood," 
Bolingbroke writes. " I propose, however, to reconcile 
you to metaphysics by showing how they may be em- 
ployed against metaphysicians ; and that whenever you 



150 Berkeley. 

do not understand them nobody else does,— no, not even 
those who wrote them." The hook encountered a number 
of ephemeral attacks in pamphlets in the course of 1732; 
and its introduction of visual immaterialism into theo- 
logical dialectic was a stumbling-block to many. 

In September of that year the ' Daily Post-Boy ' con- 
tained a letter full of objections to visual immaterialism. 
Berkeley in consequence, a few months after, produced 
^The Theory of Visual Language Vindicated and Ex- 
plained.' In this important tract he unfolds more 
fully the grounds for faith in supreme Eeason and 
intending Will, as the only ultimate explanation of 
the changes in phenomena and phenomenal things, 
through which the hierarchy of finite spirits, all de- 
pendent on the Supreme, maintain communion with 
one another, and with the Spirit in whom they all 
live and have their being. 

Though Berkeley's explanation of the knowledge of 
which we are conscious in sense had been published to 
the world for more than twenty years, this short letter of 
objections in the ' Post-Boy,' was the only published 
criticism it had drawn forth. More imposing hostile 
criticisms were now beginning to appear. "As to the 
Bishop of Cork's book, and the other book you allude 
to, the author whereof is Mr Baxter," he says in a letter 
written about this time to his American friend Johnson, 
" they are both very little read and considered here, for 
which reason I have taken no public notice of them. 
To answer objections already answered, and rejDeat the 
same things, is a needless as weU as a disagreeable task. 
JN'or should I have taken notice of that letter about 
Vision, had it not been printed in a newspaper, which 



Browne and Baxter. 151 

gave it course, and spread it through the kingdom." — The 
" Bishop of Cork " referred to was Browne, provost of 
Trinity College in Berkeley's undergraduate days, whose 
'Divine Analogy' had appeared early in 1733. It con- 
tains a dissertation on the nature and extent of our know- 
ledge of God. This is chiefly in answer to the objec- 
tions in ^ Alciphron ' to human knowledge in matters 
of theology being only analogical, there interpreted to 
mean negative. Browne had formerly enlarged on the 
incomprehensible difference between a human and the 
divine mind. This seemed to make it impossible to 
apply the term " mind " in the same meaning to both. 
He concluded, accordingly, that it was as absurd to 
attribute consciousness, intelligence, or goodness, in the 
ordinary meaning, to Deity, as to suppose God pos- 
sessed of hands or feet. This appeared to Berkeley to 
differ little, except in words, from atheism, and to imply 
logically that Deity, like Matter, is a meaningless word. 
He argued that the only ground we have for believing 
that God exists at all, also shows Him to be intelligent, 
wise, and benevolent, in the ordinary meaning of those 
words. Otherwise the name God is merely an equiva- 
lent for X, and its empty meaning may be left out of 
account in dealing with human affairs. — The " Baxter " 
mentioned in the letter to Johnson was a Scotchman,^ 
who had published a year or two before an ' Inquiry 
into the IS'ature of the Human Soul,' which contained 
a chapter on " Dean Berkeley's scheme against the 
existence of a material world," and professed to prove 
its inconclusiveness. Baxter treats Immaterialism as 

1 Baxter was born in Old Aberdeen, about 1687, and died at West 
Wliittinghame, in East Lothian, in 1750. 



152 Berkdey. 

scepticism, its advocate as one logically obliged to be a 
sceptic^ and his new theoiy as " a complication of all 
the Tarieties of sceptidsm thsA had ever been broached." 
To make this out he has to play on the ambignons woid 
^'idea;" to overlook the interpietable significance through 
which alone Eeikeley's sensuons ph^iomena become 
phenomenal things, and sensations perceptions or ex- 
pectationsL Then, after confounding the " read ideas 
of sense" with the subjective illusions of fancy, he is 
easily able to show that a world of this sort cannot 
be a world or cosmos at all, and that the new con- 
ception of matter does not afford even the practical 
knowledge needed for the regulation of life; while it 
implies that the Supreme Power must be either non- 
rational, or conscious of an intention to deceive, Bax- 
ter's criticism is interesting now as evidence that the 
Eerkeleyan conception of an unsubstantial, impotent, 
and only phenomenal matmal world, was beginning to 
atkact Scotch metaphysical intellect ; which soon after, 
in the person of David Hume, became, through the in- 
citement of the n^ative part of Berkeley's views, the 
moving force of the modem revolution in European 
thou^t. 

In 1734 E^rkelcv got iavolved ia what seemed 
a mathematical controversy only. It was really one 
form of the collision between faith and finite science. 
His " Commonplace Book ^ shows that the metaphy- 
sical principles which underiie mathematical reason- 
ing had interested him at College. Throughout the 

* Treatise on Human Knowledge,' the tract on the 

* Cause of Motion,' and the 'Minute Philosopher,' he 



Mathematics and Theology. 153 

maintained that the words '^ space " and " time " have 
a positive and intelligible meaning only so far as their 
meanings can be traced to phenomena, and that absolute 
space is the mere negation of sense consciousness. So 
Baxter argued that, to be consistent with himself, Berke- 
ley was logically bound " to suspect that even mathema- 
tics may not be very sound knowledge at the bottom." 
It happened that during these London years of renewed 
philosophical authorship, his attention was drawn to a 
ground for scepticism about religion which some mathe- 
maticians thought they had found in theological mysteries, 
and in the want of a logical justification for the principles 
of theology. We find him telling his friend Tom 
Prior, in January, that though his " health then hindered 
reading," he could " think as well as ever ; " and that 
"for amusement " he "passed his early hours in certain 
mathematical matters which might possibly produce 
something." The issue was the 'Analyst,' which ap- 
peared early in 1734. This little book caused a con- 
troversy in which Jurin, Pemberton, Benjamin Eobins, 
Colin M'Laurin, Walton, and other distiaguished mathe- 
maticians took part, and which left its mark in English 
mathematics and theology in last century. 

The 'Analyst,' in its philosophical design, was an 
ingenious example of the argumeiitmn ad hmrdnenu Its 
argument is that even boasted mathematical science 
cannot logically justify its own fundamental axioms ; 
and that its covert assumptions and conclusions are 
as inexplicable as those of the theologian. Hence re- 
ligious thought is really in no worse position than this 
most exact and certain of the external sciences. Some 
of the reasonin<:{ resembles that brought forward in the 



154 Berkeley, 

seventh dialogue of ' Alciphron/ where it is argued 
that some words have another office than that of sug- 
gesting phenomena in the imagination, and that they 
are connected with unimaginable meanings. Yet these 
words may legitimately influence our feelings and actions. 
As a Kantist might say, they belong to the sphere of the 
practical reason, operative in the region of transcendent 
truth. For Berkeley here implies that, at the root of 
our positive or phenomenal knowledge of the universe, 
there are practical principles which cannot be resolved 
into imaginable meaning, and which it is unreasonable 
to insist on translating into impressions of sense, or 
corresponding pictures of imagination. Here, too, re- 
ligion and science would be on the same footing. 
"Force," for instance, is as incomprehensible a word 
in natural philosophy as " grace '^ is in theology ; yet 
each is useful, for each has a practical, though not an 
imaginable meaning. The case is similar with the 
mathematical infinite. Mathematicians cannot translate 
into consistent imaginable meanings some of their own 
conclusions about fluxions. If religion is rooted in 
mysteries and apparent contradictions, so, too, is the 
venerable science of number and space. Modern ana- 
lysts, in their vaunted discoveries, proceed upon what 
is unrealisable in imagination; and they have there- 
fore no right to reject theology, merely because reason ers 
about religion make a demand on faith similar to what 
they do themselves. The argument ultimately comes to 
this, that all human knowledge — mathematical or the- 
ological — whether about nature and its quantitative re- 
lations in space, or about God — must merge at last into 
mysterious common convictions, which have a bearing 



The Quantitative Infinite. 155 

indeed on life and action, but which cannot be trans- 
lated into ideas of the imagination, or freed from an 
appearance of self-contradiction. 

This is, perhaps, the drift of Berkeley's argument, but 
without a full recognition of it on his own part. His 
inclination to push thought to the verge of paradox led 
him, moreover, into less defensible positions than the 
preceding, in the * Analyst' controversy. He was not 
satisfied to show the incomprehensibility of the prin- 
ciples and reasonings of mathematicians about a quanti- 
tative infinite in space and time ; he speaks as if their 
science of fluxions involved what is absolutely self- 
contradictory, and not merely what is relatively myste- 
rious. That the highest philosophy might solve such 
difiiculties, by resolving "contradiction" into a higher 
unity, was a thought foreign to Berkeley. 



156 



CHAPTEE V. 

WHETHER GOD CAN BE SEEN, AND WHAT GOD IS. 

The works produced by Berkeley in this period of con- 
troversial authorship showed a certain amount of change, 
if not in his philosophical point of view, at any rate in 
the questions for which he was trying to find a philo- 
sophical answer. The writings of his youth, which 
issued from Trinity College, were meant to demonstrate 
the unsubstantiality and impotence of the phenomenal 
things of Sense, and the meaninglessness of the words 
" matter " and " force," abstracted from phenomena and 
their implied perceptions. What he now wanted to 
explain was — what is meant by God, to whose per- 
sistence and power the persistence and power at- 
tributed to the things we see and touch had been 
referred by him. He was now more bent on proving 
that the Supreme Power is Spirit, and that the " shows 
of sense " are truly the revelation of Spirit, than even 
in arguing that the things of sense themselves depend 
on perception. His little tract on the ' Cause of Mo- 
tion' showed this tendency years before. 

But a grave difficulty lay 'in his way. It is one apt 
to perplex those who meditate deeply in philosophical 



An UnknowaUe God. 157 

tlieology, thougli I am not sure that Berkeley yet saw, 
or ever fully saw, its magnitude. It had been seen by 
Spinoza ; it was afterwards seen, from very different 
points, by Hume and by Kant. It rises in the form of 
questions like these : Is the name " God," after all, 
more intelligible than the unperceived and unperceiving 
" matter " and " force," that Berkeley had dislodged on 
account of their unintelligibleness 1 If the one can be 
resolved into the residual x, must not the other '? 'We 
cannot see or touch unphenomenal matter; but have 
we evidence, in sense or otherwise, for an unphenome- 
nal Supreme Being] If both words are meaningless, 
what gain, or satisfaction to reason, is there in sub- 
stituting one meaningless word for another meaningless 
word, which, on account of its meaninglessness, had 
been already dismissed ? Are we not inviting material- 
ists to worship an unknown and unknowable God? 
We may apply the names " mind " and " spirit " to the 
Being to which aU is thus at last referred; but this 
is presumptuously attributing to Supreme Being attri- 
butes like those we find in our own self-conscious 
personality. As Spinoza had said, ^'A triangle, if it 
could speak, must in like manner say that its God is 
triangular, or a circle that the divine nature is circular.' 
Even the pious and practical Locke, in one of the last 
sentences he ever wrote, to be found in a letter sent 
from his deathbed to his young friend Anthony Collins, 
confessed that he could not, ^' because of the common 
name, equal the 7ni7id that he found in himself to the 
infinite and incomprehensible Being, which, for want of 
right and distinct conceptions, is called mind also, or the 
Eternal Mind." 



158 Berkeley. 

With an inadequate view of this difficulty, yet with 
some apprehension that it must be met, Berkeley ex- 
changed the question of his youth — How we find, and 
what we are entitled to mean by, the material or sense- 
given world "? — into this question of his middle age — 
How we find, and what we are entitled to mean by, the 
Supreme Power, whose constant presence is signified 
by the shows of sense? 

The reader has already found that the juvenile rever- 
sal of materialism, in the ' Treatise on Human Know- 
ledge,' has a side on which it looks like universal scep- 
ticism, or at least agnosticism. Sceptics, and agnostics 
in theology, like Hume, have been very ready to detect 
this. The argument which leads to the merely phe- 
nomenal constitution of things has accordingly been 
employed to prove the merely phenomenal constitution 
of self, and the delusiveness of the personal pronouns 
"I" and "you." Deny the persistence and independ- 
ence of the phenomena we see and touch, and we must, 
it then seems, also deny persistence and independence 
altogether — which is to deny that anything exists, or 
that the word existence has any meaning. 

This universal denial was of course very far from 
Berkeley's thought and intention. Like every other 
believer in reality, he supposed persistence and power to 
centre somewhere; he had no thought of treating as 
transitory phenomena the individual persons, as well 
as the sensible things, in the universe. He thought 
that reason obliged him to banish permanence and 
power only from the phenomena he saw and touched. 
In the "common sense," as some philosophers call it, 
in which we all consciously or unconsciously share 



Sense significant of Spirits. 159 

(for in many this common sense or common faith 
remains largely latent), he found evidence that the phe- 
nomenal and ever-fluctuating world of the senses has for 
one of its functions — if not for its chief end — to make 
conscious beings aware of one another's existence; and for 
another of its functions, to educate intellect through the 
work of forming physical science. For the world of phe- 
nomenal things, transitory, and dependent on the percep- 
tions of a mind, has plainly this very remarkable charac- 
teristic somehow attached to it, — that it is the medium 
for intelligent communion among individual or separate 
conscious beings. It enables them, as it were, to make 
signals to one another. One phenomenon, too, is trusted 
as the sign of others. Thus the data of sight suggest 
data of touch; phenomena presented in any of our 
senses may be interpreted into phenomena presentable 
only in another ; and all may be read in the language 
of vision. The phenomena of our five human senses 
might, if our senses were as many as those of the Micro- 
megas of Voltaire, become significant of numberless 
aspects of existence that are now unimaginable by men. 
But all this would be only a discovery of phenomenal 
or caused causes. These so-called causes, Berkeley 
would say, are not properly causes. Theb very connec- 
tion, under what we call laws of nature, is itself the 
effect of the rational Cause or Power which the merely 
phenomenal connections of natural science either conceal 
or reveal. The remarkable characteristic of sensuous 
phenomena and phenomenal thmgs is, not merely that 
they " suggest " other phenomena and other phenomenal 
things, but that they, in a faith that is reasonable, 
enable us to communicate with other finite persons, and 



160 Berkeley, 

with the Universal Mind. Faith is latent in sense ; 
reason is latent in faith. The faith on which we rest, 
when we presuppose significance and interpretability 
in the phenomena of sense, is nothing else than latent 
reason ; and it is a further outcome of the same latent 
reason that carries us on, through sense, above nature, 
to the invisible reality. Is it consistent to trust the 
lower faith — reason implied in suggestion, on which 
scientific interpretations of nature as coexistent and 
successive rest — and then to reject, because destitute 
of logical proof, the deeper faith, still more begotten 
of reason, on which theology reposes'? We all "live 
by faith," even when we live in sense. 

These noteworthy characteristics of what we see, touch, 
hear, taste, or smell, are brought more fully into light 
in the works that belong to this middle period of 
Berkeley's life. But here, too, a want may be found, 
which perhaps unconsciously led him on, a stage nearer 
to intellectual Transcendentalism, as appeared when he 
next gave his philosophic thought to the world, ten 
years later. In the meantime, he made much of free 
or uncaused causation, as the rational origin of the 
phenomenal or caused causes which seem to precede 
one another in time, in an endless orderly regress ; 
and insisted that the former only are entitled to be 
called causes. As yet he used only the analogical ar- 
gument of empiricism to escape from disbelief in the 
Supreme Cause or Eeason; and from the meaningless- 
ness, too, which he had argued was fatal to unphenom- 
enal Matter. 

The contrast in the following sentences between " ob- 
jects," or phenomenal things — which can only be signs, 



Phenomenal Objects and Spiritual Poiver, 161 

not real causes — and causation proper, which with 
Berkeley transcends the successions of phenomena in 
nature, illustrates the point to which his thought was 
now approaching : — 

" The objects [i.e., phenomena or impressions, either sever- 
ally, or as aggregated in phenomenal things] of sense, being 
things immediately perceived, are called ideas. The cause 
of these ideas, or the power of producing them [i.e., the 
origin of our sense impressions, and of external nature, of 
which they are a part], is not the object of sense, not being 
itseK perceived [i.e., not being phenomenal], but only in- 
ferred by reason from its effects — viz., from the objects or 
ideas which are perceived by sense [i.e., which are pheno- 
menal]. Hence it follows that the Power or Cause of ideas 
[i.e., of sense phenomena, and their aggregates, which we 
call individual things of sense] is not an object of Sense, 
but of Eeason. Whenever, therefore, the appellation of 
sensible object, is used in a determined, intelligible sense [i.e., 
one which can be realised in imagination], it is not em- 
ployed to signify the absolutely existing outward Cause or 
Power, but the ideas [sensuous phenomena or impressions, 
and expectations of such] produced thereby. Ideas [sensuous 
phenomena] which are observed to be connected together, 
are vulgarly considered under the relation of cause and 
effect, whereas in strict philosophic truth they are only 
related as sign and the thing signified." ^ 

Physical sciences are all, of course, confined to the 
phenomena and phenomenal things of sense, under the 
arbitrary relation — not category — of " sign and thing 
signified." They have nothing to do with the power 
in which phenomenal things, and their established laws, 
originate, and through which they receive rational ex- 
planation. The " power " that thus exists without us, to 

1 ' Works/ vol. i. pp. 377, 378. 
P. — III. L 



162 Berkeley . 

which the ever-passing, but practically useful, phantas- 
magoria of the sensible world are to be referred, is con- 
cerned with mind in its highest faculty — above the 
operation involved in the expectations of sense, and 
above the inductive generalisations of sciences which 
deal with events in time. The sphere of merely physi- 
cal causation (if we are to call it causation), while not 
inconsistent with, is exclusive of the sphere of true 
causation, which is efficient and final. 

" As to the outward [not immanent] Cause of these ideas 
\i.e,, of those sensuous phenomena or impressions, and the 
phenomenal things which they compose, through their sig- 
nificant and interpretable but arbitrary connections of coex- 
istence and succession], whether it be one and the same, or 
various and manifold ; whether it be thinking or unthink- 
ing, spirit or body, or whatever else we conceive about it, — 
the visible appearances [phenomenal things and their laws 
which alone concern physical science] do not alter their 
nature. Though I may have an erroneous notion of the 
[unphenomenal and uncaused, final or efficient] Cause, and 
though I may be utterly ignorant of its nature, yet this does 
not hinder my making true and certain judgments about my 
ideas \i.e., the phenomena given in the perceptions and antici- 
pations of sense and science] ; — my knowing which of them 
are [phenomenally] the same, and which different ; wherein 
they agree, and wherein they disagree [phenomenally] ; which 
are [phenomenally] connected together, and wherein this 
connection consists ; whether it be founded in a likeness of 
nature, in a geometrical necessity, or merely in experience 
and custom." 1 

Theological inferences, in short, are irrelevant to 
natural science, which grows up out of "suggestions" 
due — psychologically regarded, at least — to custom or 
1 'Works,' vol. i. pp. 380, 381. 



An Analogical Argument. 163 

past experience. Science, as concerned with what is 
phenomenal only — that is to say, with orderly effects — 
has nothing to do with the nncansed and unpheno- 
menal Power, on which the phenomenal order depends ; 
for OTir perceptions by the senses, and our merely 
scientific inferences from them, will be the very same, 
however we determine about their transcendent Cause 
or Eeason. " Perhaps " — for " perhaps " is all Berkeley 
ventures to say now — "I think that the same Being 
which causes our ideas of sight p.e., the things we see], 
doth not only cause our ideas of touch likewise [z.e., 
the things we touch], but also all our ideas of p.e., 
phenomena given in] all the other senses, with all the 
varieties thereof " p.e., phenomenal nature and its whole 
constitution].^ 

So Berkeley's real world — in the deepest meaning of 
^^real" — was not found in the world of merely phenom- 
enal things perceived in sense, or anticipated in sense. 
The sensible world was for him only symbolic of a truer 
reality, and that even though the phenomena of which 
phenomena of sense are significant were to be as varied 
in kind as those presented to "the little man of Saturn," 
or to Micromegas himself. The true reality is the un- 
phenomenal Power to which the whole is at last to be 
referred. 

ISTow, what can we say, or can we say anything, 
about this Power ] It is in treating this question that 
Berkeley's analogical argument appears. 

His way of putting it might be something like this : 
We all acknowledge that we can, through the data of 
the five senses, find human spirits, consciously living 
1 * Works,' vol. i. p. 383. 



164 Berkeley. 

and working outside of our own stream of conscious 
life — the uncaused causes or creators of effects for 
which they are responsible ; as we are ourselves respon- 
sible for effects of which we therefore allow that we 
are the free or responsible causes. By analogy, we 
can equally find Spirit (objective reason, some might 
call it) expressed in the interpretable phenomena of 
vision, and indeed of perception generally, as well 
as in all the discoveries of physical science. It 
is true that we are dull, — imperfectly awake to the 
perpetual presence of this pervading Spirit — and apt 
to refer what is due to this to the secondary causes 
presented to the senses — which are not causes at all, 
but only signs of the coexistences and successions di- 
vinely established within the physical cosmos. What 
is needed is that, through reflection, we should get our 
otherwise dormant common sense, or common conscious- 
ness, awakened to perceive the analogy. We are all 
practically alive to our intellectual obligation to inter- 
pret the words and acts of other men, as signifying the 
existence and operation of human spirits, with their 
individual shares of real knowledge. The analogous 
intellectual obligation to recognise Supreme Spirit, in 
the sense symbolism or intelligibility of nature, is apt, 
through obvious influences, not to be so much felt ; this 
deeper constituent of the common sense needs, therefore, 
to be drawn forth by much philosophical and religious 
exercise. But when it is drawn forth, we find the in- 
tuitive obligation to recognise that we daily " see God " 
— in the same sense, at least, as we may be said daily 
to see our fellow-men ; for even they, in strictness, can- 
not be seen, although their bodies can. 



" We see God as we see Men!' 165 

iN'or, he might say, is this sight of God which we have 
daily, the sight of an unknowable " something." We 
find through inner experience what conscious life is, 
though we have no sense-phenomenal knowledge of the 
" I " or the " You." AYe can attribute this, can we not, 
to God as well as to our fellow-men % Unphenomenal 
Matter, on the contrary, is x or Abracadabra. So " God " 
is more than a meaningless name — more than the Un- 
knowable behind the sense symbolism of nature. God 
means the eternally sustaining Spirit — the active con- 
scious Eeason of the universe. Of God's existence we 
have the same sort of proof as we have of the existence 
of other conscious agents like ourselves, when we say 
we " see " them. Of course we never see, and never 
can see, another human spirit, even when his body, 
as a phenomenal thing, is present to our senses ; we can 
only perceive the visible and tangible appearances, behind 
which reason obliges us to recognise an invisible indi- 
vidual spirit, numerically different from our own. We 
implicitly trust the phenomena of sense, when discharg- 
ing their function of thus making us aware of the exist- 
ence, and of some of the mental states, of other human 
spirits like ourselves. We are apt to distrust their 
exercise of an analogous office, in revealing to us the 
thoughts of the Supreme Spirit that are embodied in 
physical laws ; yet His presence is universal, and always 
active, while finite spirits only act within a circumscribed 
sphere, and at intervals. 

Berkeley insists that it is the duty of the philo- 
sopher to overcome tliis unreasonable distrust, and ar- 
gues that faith in God is even more a necessity of 
reason than the faith which is our rational assurance 



166 Berheley. 

of the real existence of the human spirits who are 
signified by what we see. The spiritual world glimmers 
through the visible, in the very fact of the visibility 
of things, when read according to a theory of visual im- 
materialism. Eeason, begotten of faith, is then found 
to be indeed latent in sense. 

" ' Nothing,' said the sceptical Alciphron,^ ' so much con- 
vinces me of the existence of another person as his speakmg 
to me. It is my hearing you talk that, in strict and philoso- 
phical truth, is to me the best argument for your being. 
And this is a pecuHar argument, inapplicable to your 
purpose ; for you will not, I suppose, pretend that God 
speaks to man in the same clear and sensible manner that 
one man doth to another ? ' — ' That,' Euphranor replies, ' is 
really, in truth, my opinon ; and it should be yours, too, if 
you are consistent with yourself, and abide by your own 
definition of language. ... In consequence of your own 
sentiments and concessions, you have as much reason to 
think the Universal Agent or God speaks to your eyes, as you 
can have for thinking any particular person speaks to your 
ears. You stare to find that God is not far from any one of 
us, and that in Him we live, and move, and have our being. 
You who in the beginning of this our conference thought it 
strange that God [if He exists] should leave Himself without 
a witness, do now think it strange that the witness should be 
so full and clear.' — ' I must own I do,' Alciphron is made to 
acknowledge. ^ I never imagined it could be pretended that 
we saw God with our fleshly eyes as plain as we see any 
human person whatsoever, and that He daily speaks to our 
senses in a manifest and clear dialect.' — ^This language of 
vision,' Crito interposes, 'has a necessary connection with 
knowledge, wisdom, and goodness. It is equivalent to a 
constant creation, betokening an immediate act of power and 
providence. The instantaneous production and reproduction 



1 ' Works,' vol. ii. pp. 146, kc. 



What the Analogy Proves. 167 

of so many phenomenal signs, combined, dissolved, trans- 
posed, diversified, and adapted to such an endless variety of 
purposes, ever shifting with, the occasions suited to them, 
doth set forth and testify the immediate [external or imma- 
nent ?] operation of a Spirit or thinking Being. ^ " 

But without a previous assumption of the perfec- 
tion or infinity of God, this analogical reasoning, which 
Berkeley so beautifully unfolds, can carry us only to an 
inadequate conclusion. It suggests that we are now 
in the presence of a Power that operates according to 
rules; but it contains no proof that the ordered phe- 
nomenal changes will continue, in similar orderly co- 
existences and successions ; still less that the Power is 
trustworthy and perfect. Why may not our whole ex- 
perience be due to the operation of a malignant con- 
triver, who finds pleasure in our temporary delusions, 
and through whose influence our common sense, or irre- 
sistible faith in things, is only inherited deception 1 The 
argument presupposes the trustworthiness of the Power 
that is continually addressing us in the language of the 
senses. This universal language itself can afi'ord no 
evidence of the continued veracity of the unknown 
speaker, which is the main thing for us. Eternity, 
omnipotence, perfect trustworthiness, and goodness, all 
presuppose other grounds, either in faith or in reason, 
than those expressed in the empirical argument from 
analogy. Putting aside the evidence of spiritual con- 
sciousness or moral experience, and regarding the ques- 
tion with the eye of natural science,^ the assumption 

1 Natural and biological science, ^er se, is philosophically agnostic 
— ^phenomena of sense, and faith in their necessary phenomenal 
order, being its only data, while faith in what transcends this is put 



168 Berkeley. 

involved in Berkeley's answer is a bold one. How 
do we know that it is true ] We have proved, by 
this analogy of the universal language of natural law 
with the languages of men, that — at present, and 
through long past time — men have been in intercourse 
through their senses with a calculating Being, aged 
therefore, but destined, for all we can teU, soon to 
die, powerful now, who has customary ways of acting, 
and is perhaps kindly disposed; — but what of his 
absolute trustworthiness? As far as this merely em- 
pirical analogy goes, Hume was warranted in think- 
ing that the theory of " the universal energy and 
operation " of a divine or perfect Being was " too 
bold ever to carry conviction with it to a man fully 
apprised of the weakness of human reason, and the 
narrow limits to which it is confined in all its opera- 
tions. Though the chain of arguments which conducts 
to it was ever so logical, there must arise a strong 
suspicion that it has carried us beyond the reach of our 
faculties. We are got into fairyland; and there we 
have no reason to trust our common methods of argument, 
or to think that our usual analogies have any authority. 
Our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses." 

An apprehension of this sort was at the bottom of the 
fallacious attempt of Descartes to prove by argument 
the validity of the faith which assures us of reality, 
and that we awoke in a universe that is dependent 
on a reliable Power. It was an expression of felt 
need for evidence that we are not the sport of a 
malignant Being, who finds pleasure in our illusions, 

aside, as ■unscientific, whicli indeed it is, according to this conception 
of science. 



Physical Analogy Inadeqitate, 169 

— the need for evidence that conscious life may not, 
instead of a " well ordered," turn out to be in the end 
a deceptive dream. Berkeley had to go deeper than 
mere empirical analogies could carry him, in order 
to show the reasonableness of consoling trust in the 
Power that it had been the governing thought of his 
life to realise, as "not far from any one of us," for 
"in Him we live, and move, and have our being." His 
later thought, too, expressed more of the sense of infinity 
being involved in the case : " Who by searching can 
find out God ? who can find out the Almighty unto 
perfection ? " We find him more in this mental attitude, 
in the next and last appearance of his philosophical 
thought about things. Eut we must first follow him 
into a new scene. 



PAET III— 1734-53. 



CHAPTEE I. 

MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY AT CLOYNE. 

In May 1734, Berkeley returned to Ireland. Except 
occasional visits, he had been a wanderer for more than 
twenty years. He returned to take possession of the 
bishopric of Cloyne. That remote region was hencefor- 
ward to be his home. The interest of the philosophic 
Queen, and some regard to what was due to him after 
the Bermuda disappointment, probably explains the 
mystery of the unworldly idealist appearing in high 
office in the Irish Church of the eighteenth century. 
He thus resumed life in his native island, able to devote 
his benevolent sympathies to the service of his country- 
men, and his mind to contemplation and search for truth. 
Berkeley spent eighteen years of almost unbroken 
seclusion at Cloyne. The place itself suited an increas- 
ing inclination for a meditative domestic life, which had 
been fostered by his circumstances in America. The 
eastern and northern part of the county of Cork formed 
his diocese. It was bounded on the west by Cork har- 



A Meditative Retreat, 171 

bour and the river Lee, and on the east by the beautiful 
Blackwater and the mountains of Waterf ord ; the hills of 
Limerick protected it on the north ; and the sea, which 
was its southern boundary, approached within two miles 
of his new home in the village of Cloyne. This is a 
compact territory, apart from the great currents of life, 
about twenty miles in length, and extending inwards 
about twelve miles from the coast. The interior consists 
of two nearly parallel limestone valleys, cultivated and 
fertile, but bare of trees. Li one of these stood the 
cathedral, with the village, its round tower, and its 
1500 inhabitants. What was then the bishop's resi- 
dence may still be seen, screened from the road by 
shrubs and trees, whilst its other sides look towards a 
large garden, in which is a broad walk, Berkeley's favour- 
ite resort for meditative purposes, once lined by hedges 
of myrtles planted by his own hand. The name was 
significant, as well as the place — for Cloyne, in its origi- 
nal meaning, is a cave or place of retirement. 

Here, before the summer of 1734 was ended, Berkeley 
was settled, " continuing his studies with unabated at- 
tention." Plato and Hooker, we find, were among his 
constant companions. The Cloyne life seems soon to 
have become a sedentary one, and with increasing ill- 
health. Idealising his new home, he saw charms around 
it not so obvious to the ordinary eye. Travelling was 
now irksome to him, and he was as much removed as he 
had been at Ehode Island from any who remained of 
the men of thought and letters of his more social days. 
Cork took the place of iN'ewport, but Cork was twenty 
miles from Cloyne, while J^ewport was only three from 
Whitehall. His episcopal neighbour at Cork at first 



172 Berkeley, 

was Dr Peter Browne, Provost at Trinity College a 
quarter of a century before, and lately involved with hini 
in controversies of theological philosophy. The county 
squires and their families, as we see in the allusions of 
letters and diaries, supplied most of the society. Among 
the neighbouring clergy, Isaac Gervais, one of the pre- 
bendaries of Lismore, and afterwards Dean of Tuam, 
was a frequent correspondent and visitor, who often en- 
livened the episcopal residence by his wit. The annual 
visits of Thomas Prior, and his steady correspondence, 
maintained that early friendship to the end. Seeker, 
the common friend of Berkeley and Butler, now Bishop 
of Bristol, and Benson, the Bishop of Gloucester, whom 
he had known in Italy, often exchanged letters with 
him.^ Cloyne was far from the life of courts, or colleges, 
or the coffee-houses of London, and with the sound of 
the melancholy ocean to interrupt its silence. Swift was 
wearing out an unhappy old age, and Pope was almost 
the sole survivor of the men of letters among whom he 
had moved in other days. There are no remains of 
Cloyne correspondence with Pope. We are told, indeed, 
that its beauty was represented to the bard of Twicken- 
ham by the imagination that in former days had repre- 
sented Ischia, so that Pope had "almost determined to 
make a visit to Ireland to see a place which his friend 
had painted out to him with all the brilliancy of colour- 

1 In a letter from Seeker, for instance, in February 1735, we 
read : " Your friend Mr Pope is publishing small poems every now 
and then, full of much wit, and not a little keenness. Our common 
friend Dr Butler hath almost completed a set of speculations upon 
the credibility of religion from its analogy to the constitution and 
course of nature, which I believe in due time you will read with 
pleasure." Butler's ' Analogy' appeared in the year after. 



Domestic Life at Cloyne. 173 

ing, thoTigh to common eyes it presents nothing that is 
very worthy of attention." 

One finds almost no trace of impressions made by 
Berkeley at Cloyne. An episcopal successor writes, that 
" of Berkeley little is remembered." His ways were too 
qniet to strike, and his thoughts were too subtle to be 
appreciated by the squires and peasants of Imokilly. 
The recluse thinker, of cosmopolitan aspirations, whose 
thoughts were habitually in regions towards which it 
was difficult to follow him, left no deep local mark. 

The only interruption to this secluded domestic life 
was in the autumn of 1737, when he went to Dublin for 
some months to attend the Irish House of Lords. This 
seems to have been the last year in which he went be- 
yond the limits of the county of Cork till he left it to 
return no more. Suffering in health, he lived year after 
year happy in his home, devoted to books and to his 
thoughts. The letters disclose pleasant pictures of the 
family life, and his share in the education of his chil- 
dren. Of his only daughter he writes : " So bright a 
little gem ! were it only to prevent her doing mischief 
among the illiterate squires, I am resolved to treat her 
like a boy, and make her study eight hours a-day." The 
love of art, as well as the love of truth, which was so 
much shown in his youth, followed him into his con- 
templative old age, and was encouraged among his chil- 
dren. He had no ear for music himself, but music was 
an enthusiasm in the family, and he retained the well- 
known Signor Pasquilino for years to teach his chil- 
dren. It was then that the Signor, who had been learn- 
ing English from a dictionary, exclaimed in an outbreak 
of gratitude, " May God picMe your lordship ! " The 



174 Berkeley, 

county neighbours were often invited into the palace for 
concerts of music, or to enjoy pictures of the best French 
and Italian masters. 

The perennial "condition of Ireland question" at- 
tracted him almost as soon as he was settled in Cloyne. 
The South Sea disaster had first distinctly shown the 
sympathy in social progress which was so much at the 
bottom of his American mission. In the remote south 
of Ireland he found a large population of native Irish 
— a religious people, with strong ideas of race — and 
settled among them a small society of English colonists 
— aliens in race and religion. The aborigines, long ruled 
in the interest of the stranger, had become unable to rule 
themselves. The self-reliance which, fifteen years before, 
he had preached as the only " means for preventing the 
ruin of Great Britain," was even more needed in Ireland, 
where the gospel of seK-supporting work was unknown, 
and where the simplest maxims of economy were un- 
practised. The Protestant bishops were not then the 
leaders in enterprises which aimed at the good of the 
whole Irish nation, but Berkeley was never hindered 
by ecclesiastical conventionality. Musing on the mis- 
fortunes of Ireland, he rose from the special case to 
scientific principles, and worked his way to much that 
is true in economic science, forty years before Adam 
Smith published the ' Wealth of ISTations,' and ten years 
before David Hume produced his political essays. 

The result, characteristically enough, appeared in the 
form of a series of queries. The First Part of Berkeley's 
* Querist' was published in Dublin, 1735. It was fol- 
lowed by other two Parts in the two following years. 



The Condition of Ireland, 175 

The * Querist ' shows characteristic humour and saga- 
city, and is still interesting, though some of its lessons 
would now be rejected as economically fallacious. He 
dreaded imports and luxurious expenditure, as a cause of 
loss, and acted as well as wrote for the encouragement 
of home-made productions of every kind ; his own dress 
and that of his family being made at the village of 
Cloyne. He strongly supported a paper money, and 
maintained that industry was the only source of wealth, 
the true idea of money being that of "a ticket or 
counter." The 'Querist' abounds in maxims of large 
and generous regard for the whole Irish population. 
" Berkeley," says Sir James Mackintosh, " was the first 
eminent Protestant, after the unhappy contest at the 
Eevolution, who avowed his love for all his countrymen. 
His patriotism was not, like Swift's, confined to a colony 
of English. The ' Querist ' perhaps contains more hints, 
then original, still unapplied in legislation and political 
economy, than are to be found in any equal space." 
Here are a few examples of the queries, taken at random 
out of nearly six hundred : — 

" Whether the creating of wants be not the likeliest way 
to produce industry in a people ? Whether a scheme for the 
welfare of this nation should not take in the whole inhabi- 
tants ? Whether it is not a vain attempt to project the flour- 
ishing of our Protestant gentry, exclusive of the bulk of the 
natives ? Whether, in imitation of the Jesuits in Paris, who 
admit Protestants to study in their colleges, it may not be 
right for us also to admit Eoman Catholics into our college, 
without obliging them to attend chapel duties, or catechisms, 
or divinity lectures ? Whether the fable of Hercules and 
the carter ever suited any nation like this nation of Ireland ? 
Whether there ever was, is, or will be, an industrious na- 



176 Berkeley, 

tion poor, or an idle rich ? Whether it were not wrong to 
suppose land, or gold and silver either, to be wealth ? 
Whether we can propose to thrive so long as we entertain 
a wrong-headed distrust of England ? " 

Some years after Eerkeley settled in Cloyne, the 
neighbourhood was ravaged by famine and fever. Num- 
bers of the poor perished. Dark months of suffering, 
in the winter of 1739, had consequences of lasting in- 
terest in his mental history. They gave rise to a mo- 
dified development of his early philosophic thought. 
The deaths among his neighbours led him to search for 
a remedy for disease. He had been proposing medicine 
for the body social ; he now wanted to find a medicine 
for the bodily organism, on which the happiness and 
vigour of the embodied human spirit so much depends. 
Some American experience reminded him of wonderful 
medicinal properties of tar, especially tar dissolved in 
water. The American Indians believed in it as a panacea 
for the ills of flesh. Some of his own experiments 
seemed to verify a large conception of its possible uses. 
It so happened that he was about the same time much 
immersed in Platonic and Neoplatonic studies, and was 
learning to recognise the Universal Eeason, shared in 
by men, as the Universal Principle or Agent — adum- 
brated in the phenomenal things of sense, and in their 
established laws. An eccentric ingenuity united these 
two subjects in the train of his thoughts, — the law 
of the medicinal agency of tar-water, and the univer- 
salising Reason or Intellect. He made experiments with 
tar-water for years. Its success in some diseases en- 
couraged him to try it in others, and with a result that 
seemed to correspond* to his expectations. He mused 



Tar- Water and Plato. 177 

over the question why tar-water should be so universally 
beneficial. The hypothesis occurred that tar must be 
charged to an extraordinary degree with " pure invisible 
fire, the most subtle and elastic of bodies," and the vital 
element of the universe ; and also that water might be the 
means by which this contribution of life was to be drawn 
off from tar, and communicated to vegetable and animal 
organisms. Still, the vital fire, however interesting from 
the point of view of natural science and medical art, 
and however wide its medicinal applications, could, after 
all, at the philosophical point of view, be only a pheno- 
menal or instrumental cause. Its own true cause, and 
the cause of its so-called effects, must be the Universal 
Agent or Infinite Mind. 

This speculation aroused in Berkeley the imaginative 
enthusiasm of which he had so large a store, which, 
with a certain excess in each instance, had been drawn 
in different directions by ideals successively presented 
throughout his life. It was now kindled by a supposed 
discovery which seemed to mitigate, if not in the end 
completely to remove, the physical suffering of disease, 
and thus to open a new vista of happiness for mankind 
in their present state of embodied conscious life. The en- 
thusiasm was natural to one so susceptible and benevo- 
lent. The corporeal organism and the conscious spirit in 
man are so connected — at least in this mortal life — that 
what invigorates a human body also supplies new re- 
sources of intellect and spiritual life for the common 
good. Human beings with bodies more largely charged 
with the vital fire might make unprecedented advances 
in the struggle with prejudice and vice, and the future 
history of mankind might thus become a happy con- 

P. — III. M 



178 Berkeley, 

trast to its past. Berkeley had himself suffered for 
years from a complication of maladies, by which his 
old intellectual and social energy had been reduced. 
He might now be restored. The whole conception 
awakened a fervid admiration for tar -water, and a 
missionary zeal in the proclamation of its virtues hardly 
inferior to that with which, twenty years before, he had 
projected the Christian civilisation of JSTorth America. 
It became the ruling passion of the closing years of his 
life. He set up an apparatus for manufacturing tar- 
water at Cloyne. It was the one medicine in his house- 
hold ; and he tried, by offering it in new and more ^pal- 
atable forms, or surrounding it with a halo of philoso- 
phical speculation, to make the nauseous drug the one 
great medicine for his neighbours and for aU the world. 

In 1744 this tar-water enthusiasm brought him out 
once more as an author in metaphysical philosophy, as 
it happened for the last time in his life, and for the first 
time since his settlement in his " serene corner " at 
Cloyne. The most lasting consequence of the famine 
and fever of 1739 has been the curious volume of 
aphorisms, in which Berkeley made the effects of the 
supposed panacea an occasion for a chain of medita- 
tive thoughts upon the Power at work in or behind 
phenomenal things, and upon the principle of causality 
in the universe. The more empirical phenomenalism 
of his youth now enlarged itself into an intellectual 
phenomenalism, as it went on to unfold principles of 
rational connection, which, in making phenomenal know- 
ledge possible, enable us to rise from physical science 
into philosophical theology. The phenomenal shadows 
seemed to vanish more than ever, in the blaze of this 



The Tar- Water Controversy. 179 

new revelation of the Eternal Spirit, or imiversalising 
Intellect and Will, through which they receive a reflected 
reality. 

In the spring of 1744, accordingly, a considerable 
volume made its appearance, entitled ' A Chain of Philo- 
sophical Eeflections and Inquiries concerning Tar-Water, 
and divers other subjects connected together and arising 
out of one another.' The book had a great run for some 
years. iN'o former work of Berkeley so soon or so widely 
engaged general attention. A second edition, under the 
name of 'Siris,' or the ' Chain,* ^ appeared a few weeks 
after the first. Tar- water, here proclaimed to be "of 
a nature so mild and benign, and proportioned to the 
human constitution, as to warm without heating, and 
to cheer but not inebriate," ^ became the fashion every- 
where. Manufactories of the professed panacea were 
established in Dublin and London, as well as in differ- 
ent places on the Continent and in America. Professional 
physicians were roused against the philosophical and 
ecclesiastical intruder into their province. Pamphlets 
were published to discredit the new medicine, and 
these provoked replies. A tar-water controversy en- 
sued, — not less prolific than ^ Alciphron ' and the * Ana- 
lyst ' had been in the controversy with the free-thinkers 
ten years before. The contagion spread to other coun- 
tries. ' Siris ' was translated into French, German, 
Dutch, and Portuguese. The subject was often alluded 

1 2€ipa, a chain — i.e., of philosophical reflections about the universe. 

2 Siris, § 217. So Cowper— 

** The cups 
That cheer, but not inebriate, wait on each." 

—The Task, B. iv. 39. 



180 Berkeley, 

to in the correspondence and literature of the times. 
"A panacea," Fielding wrote ten years afterwards, 
"one of the greatest of scholars and best of men did 
lately apprehend that he had discovered. It is true he 
was no physician; and yet perhaps no other modern 
hath contributed so much to make his physical skill 
useful to the public. I mean the late Bishop of Cloyne, 
and the discovery is that of the virtues of tar water." 

The popularity of ' Siris ' during Berkeley's life was 
due not to the metaphysics so curiously engrained in it, 
but to its supposed discovery of a fact in physics which 
was to produce a revolution in medicine. The phys- 
ical hypothesis passed into oblivion when experience 
failed to verify it, and when the promised panacea was 
reduced to the comparatively humble position assigned 
to tar and creosote in the modern pharmacopoeia. With 
his characteristic impetuosity, Berkeley had forgotten. 
Bacon's contrast of the two ways of searching for physical 
truth. " The one flies from the senses and particulars 
to the highest generalisations, which it too readily takes 
for granted, and proceeds at once to apply for the dis- 
covery of middle axioms. The other draws its princi- 
ples cautiously from the senses and particulars, rising 
by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it reaches the 
highest generalisations last of all."-'- On the other hand, 
the metaphysics of the supersensible which Berkeley 
mixed up with his medical physics, important as it is, 
as an even extravagant expression of the great culmin- 
ating thought of his life — the Universal Agent and 
Intellect, the one true reality, concealed and yet re- 
vealed in Sense — was too foreign to the prevailing modes 
1 'Novum Organum.* 



A Change of Tone. 181 

of thought to engage sympathy at the time. It left no 
mark in the history of philosophy. And so the teach- 
ing of which ' Siris ' was the final expression has de- 
scended, shorn of those very elements for the sake of 
which its analysis — destructive of abstractions in sense 
— was carried on in its early stage. It has come to be 
interpreted as universal immaterialism, but without its 
(stiU crude) reconstructive spiritual consciousness and 
intellectualism. 

The tone of ^ Siris ' is in a marked way different from 
what we find in the productions of the second, and 
still more the first, part of Berkeley's life. With some 
of the old disposition to exaggerate one element in 
the complex constitution of our experience, there is an 
increase of tolerance, and a philosophical eclecticism 
hitherto latent. There is also less determination to see 
the final solution of all the difficulties of philosophy 
in his early conception of material things, as in them- 
selves xmsubstantial, impotent, and merely phenomenal. 
He recognises that there is more in the universe for the 
philosopher to think about than that esse must heperctpi. 
This favourite conclusion of former years is now insin- 
uated more modestly, as the beginning rather than the 
outcome of the philosopher's insight into things. Greek 
experience and Greek reading had taught him that the 
world in which we participate when we become con- 
scious is not so easily divested of its ultimate mysteri- 
ousness as it seemed in long past days in Dublin. This 
feeling of its mysteriousness had indeed been growing 
upon him ; we can trace it through ' Alciphron ' and in 
the ^ Analyst.' The attempt in ' Siris ' to fly in the 
empyrean of pure intellect divorced from sense seems 



182 Berkeley, 

accompanied by a feeling of intellectual collapse. It 
was as with. " the buoyant dove " of Kant's illustration, 
"which, when with free wing it traverses the air of 
which it feels the resistance, is apt to imagine it might 
fly still better in the vacuum beyond." " So Plato," 
Kant goes on to say, " forgets and looks slightingly on 
the sensible world, because it imposes on his reason such 
narrow limitations, and ventures on the wings of Ideas 
into the empty space of pure intellect. He has not 
remarked that in spite of his efforts he makes no pro- 
gress, for he has no point of support on which to uphold 
him in his attempt to bear the understanding out of its 
natural place." It was so with the Berkeleyan Platon- 
ism of ' Siris.' This inability to move in the region to 
which he had now betaken himself, compared with his 
easy argumentative career when demonstrating the phe- 
nomenal nature of sensible things, disposed him more to 
theological and philosophical eclecticism. He welcomed 
religious faith in any form of thought consistent with 
the supremacy of Mind, immanently or externally, in the 
world. Altogether, in whatever way the mental change 
may have occurred, he looks larger and more liberal, 
if also more grave and mystical, in this new book, with 
its indistinct and undigested conceptions from the writ- 
ings of ancients and moderns. He leaves us at the end 
with the parting thought that " in this mortal state we 
must be satisfied to make the best of those glimpses of 
truth within our reach ; " — yet encouraged by his own 
experience to add that " the eye by long use comes to 
see even in the darkest cavern," and that there is "no 
subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of 
truth by long poring on it." He has found, indeed, 



Contemplative Melancholy, 183 

that "truth is the cry of all, but the game of only a 
few. Certainly where it is the chief passion, it doth 
not give way to vulgar cares and views ; nor is it con- 
tented with a little ardour in the early tioie of life, 
active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and 
revise. He that would make a real progress in know- 
ledge must dedicate his age as well as youth, the later 
growth as well as first-fruits, at the altar of truth." 
Such was the spirit in which Berkeley lived at Clo}Tie. 
Instead of the vehement argumentative pursuit of one 
thought into logical consec^uences which were to resolve 
all philosophical differences and difficulties — as in the 
* Treatise on Human Knowledge,* we have in ^Siris' 
an unfinished weighing and revision of the whole, in 
years given to much reading and contemplative thought. 
A veia of melancholy becomes more discernible in 
the years after ' Siris ' appeared. Attempts were made 
in vain to induce him to exchange the extreme seclu- 
sion and supposed gloom of Cloyne for episcopal pre- 
ferment that would involve him more in society. Eut 
he still showed himself the same " absolute philosopher 
with regard to money, titles, and power," that Swift had 
described him more than twenty years before. "A 
greater income would not tempt me to remove from 
Cloyne," he writes to Tom Prior in 1746, "or to set 
aside my Oxford scheme, which was delayed by the 
illness of my son ; yet I am as intent upon it and as 
much resolved as ever. The truth is, I have a scheme 
of my own for this long time past in which I propose 
more satisfaction and enjoyment to myself than I could 
iu that high station." ^ He was " no man's rival " in 
1 The Primacy. 



184 Berkeley, 

these matters. " I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, 
and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a 
hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my private 
satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time 
than wear a diadem. As for the argument from the 
opportunity of doing good, I observe that duty obliges 
men in high stations to decline occasions of doing good, 
but duty doth not oblige men to solicit such high 
stations." 

In 1751 a deep sorrow visited the beautiful home-life, 
in the death of the second son, William, at the age of 
sixteen. The loss was thought to have struck too close 
to his father's heart. " I was a man," so he writes,^ 
" retired from the amusement of politics, visits, and what 
the world calls pleasure. I had a little friend, educated 
under mine own eye, whose painting delighted me, whose 
music ravished me, and whose lively gay spirit was a 
continual feast. It has pleased God to take him hence. 
God, I say, in mercy hath deprived me of this pretty 
gay plaything. His parts and person, his innocence and 
piety, his particularly uncommon affection for me, had 
gained too much upon me. Kot content to be fond of 
him, I was vain of him. I had set my heart too much 
upon him — more, perhaps, than I ought to have done 
upon anything in this world." 

The last of his letters which remains was addressed 
to Dean Gervais. It expresses the sombre sentiments 
with which, in April 1752, he was looking to the 
close of his recluse life in the " serene corner " in which 
he spent eighteen years. " We have often wanted your 
enlivening company to dissipate the gloom of Cloyne. 
1 March 8, 1751. 



A Nevj Project. 185 

This I look on as enjoying France at second hand. I 
wish anything but the gout could fix you among us. 
For my own part, I submit to years and infirmities. My 
views in this world are mean and narrow ; it is a thing 
in which I have small share, and which ought to give 
me small concern. I abhor business, and especially to 
have to do with great persons and great affairs, which I 
leave to such as you, who delight in them and are fit 
for them. The evening of life I choose to pass in a 
quiet retreat. Ambitious projects, intrigues and quarrels 
of statesmen, are things I have been formerly amused 
with, but now they seem to be a vain, fugitive dream.'' 

About four months after these words were written, 
Berkeley saw Cloyne for the last time. He had formed 
a new project, of which hints have already appeared in 
his letters. The " life academico-philosopliical," which 
he once sought to realise in Bermuda, he now hoped 
to find at Oxford. 



186 



CHAPTEE 11. 

OXFORD, 

In August 1752 Berkeley set out in quest of a retreat 
whose charm lie had experienced during his first summer 
in England. He had visited Oxford forty years before. 
It had now for some time occupied his imagination as 
the ideal home of his old age. He found the desired 
opportunity in having sent his son George there instead 
of to Dublin. This confirmed the desire to spend his 
remaining days in indulging that passion for learned 
retirement which had so strong a hold of him, and was 
really one of the motives of his American mission. In 
1724 he wanted to resign a deanery, if it should interfere 
with what he longed for in Bermuda : he wanted now 
to resign a bishopric, that he might realise the beauti- 
ful vision in Oxford. He first tried to exchange Cloyne 
for an Oxford headship or canonry. Failing in this, he 
put an unconditional resignation in the hands of the 
Secretary of State. The oddness of the proposal excited 
the curiosity of George the Second. When the king 
discovered by whom it was made, he said that Berkeley 
should die a bishop in spite of himself, but that he might 
live where he pleased. And now in this month of 



Academical Idealism, 187 

August, in 1752, we find him with his wife and daugh- 
ter on their way to the city of colleges, in the fair vale 
of the Isis and Cherwell, so dear to sensibilities like his, 
with gathered memories of a thousand years. 

He made his Will a few days before he left Cloyne, 
bequeathing any property he might have to his wife, 
with the characteristic injunction that " the expense 
of his funeral should not exceed twenty pounds." ^ As 
it happened, any property he left was the scanty residue 
possible at the end of a life of large-hearted munificence, 
with its favourite motto — non sihi sed toti. One curi- 
ous provision, requiring his body to be kept five days 
above gTound, or longer, before it is buried, " even till 
it grow offensive by the cadaverous smell," shows that 
he had somehow conceived the possibility of being 
buried alive. ^ When he left Cork in the ship which 
carried his wife, his daughter, and himself to Bristol, 
he was prostrated by weakness, and had to be taken 
from the landing-place to Oxford on a horse-litter.^ 
It was on the 25 th August that the little party from 
Cloyne saw the domes and church towers around their 
new home, amidst the soft repose of the rural English 
scenery which he loved. 

Our picture of Berkeley at Oxford is dim. According 

^ See * Works/ vol. iv. p. 345. 

2 Perhaps on the suggestion of a curious little book I have lately 
stumbled upon, which had appeared in Dublin a few years before he 
died, entitled, — ' The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the 
Danger of Precipitate Interments Demonstrated' (Dublin, 1748). 
It contains a number of cases of persons thus buried alive, " and 
directions for preventing such accidents," almost in the words of 
Berkeley's Will. 

3 His friend Bishop Butler died at Bath, as it happened, a few 
weeks before this landing at Bristol. 



188 Berkeley, 

to tradition, he lived with his family in a house in Holy- 
well Street, near the gardens of l!^ew College, and not 
far from the cloisters of Magdalen. Oxford itself, in 
the middle of the eighteenth century, was living on 
the inherited glories of the past. Among the residents 
in 1752 hardly any name suggests more than medioc- 
rity. His friend Dr Conybeare was Dean of Christ 
Church, and to him he had intrusted his son. Seeker 
had now been bishop of Oxford for many years, and 
spent his summers at Cuddesden and his winters in 
London. A few years earlier Adam Smith had gone 
to study at Oxford; and in the spring of this year 
Edward Gibbon entered Magdalen to spend fourteen 
months, — according to his own account, " the most idle 
and unprofitable in his whole life." The torpor of 
the place was beginning to be moved by Wesley, whose 
sermons in St Mary's had denounced with evangelical 
fervour the frivolous life of the University. Through 
him and others Oxford became the source of the re- 
vival of one of the three schools of religious life, which 
it is the glory of the Church of Hooker and Andrewes 
and Cudworth to unite within its ample fold ; and the 
life of the other two was afterwards restored from the 
same academic centre by Newman and Arnold. 

Berkeley resumed study at Oxford in improved health. 
In October a ' Miscellany containing several Tracts,' by 
the Eishop of Cloyne, appeared in London and Dublin. 
Except one, * Farther Thoughts on Tar- Water,' it con- 
sisted of reprints of the 'De Motu' and other short 
pieces. A third edition of * Alciphron ' was published 
about the same time. This edition is remarkable for 
omitting the sections in the seventh dialogue which con- 



Sudden Death. 189 

tain a defence of the early phenomenalist !N"ominalism, 
now out of harmony with the Platonic Eealism and 
supersensible philosophy of ' Siris.' 

l^othing remains to show how far his domestic seclu- 
sion in Holywell Street realised the dream of an aca- 
demic retreat. At any rate the realisation did not last 
long : he suddenly realised instead the mystery of death. 
On the evening of Sunday the 14th of January 1753 
he passed away without any warning. His son told Dr 
Johnson/ in the most authentic account we have of 
the event, that, — "as he was sitting with my mother, 
sister, and myself, suddenly, and without the least pre- 
vious notice or pain, he was removed to the enjoyment 
of eternal rewards ; and although all possible means 
were instantly used, no symptom of life ever appeared 
after. He had arrived at Oxford on the 25th of August, 
and had received great benefit from the change of air, 
and by God's blessing on tar- water, insomuch that for 
some years he had not been in better health than he 
was the instant before he left us." 

Six days after he died, he was buried in the Cathedral 
of Christ ChurcL 

1 In a letter dated Christ Church, October 16, 1753. See Beards- 
ley's 'Life of Johnson,' p. 174 — in which this interesting letter ap- 
peared for the first time, in 1874. 



190 



CHAPTEE III. 

SIRIS AND THE SUPERSENSIBLE. 

The third and latest stage of Berkeley's philosophical 
development is reached in ^ Siris.' This is his last 
word in a life-long endeavour — often interrupted by 
movements from place to place, and by pursuit of so- 
cial ideals — ^to reach the essentially reasonable view of 
things in which philosophy should consist, and towards 
which the different speculative systems of the world 
may be regarded as so many approximations. In ex- 
ploring *Siris,' we naturally ask how far Berkeley's 
philosophic insight carried him; and whether, as there 
seen in its final stage, it contributes any element of 
lasting value to the common stock of the world's phi- 
losophical endeavours. A true and complete philosophy 
must be in harmony with all the facts of our complex, 
intellectual and moral, experience. A new system de- 
deserves acceptance, in proportion as it agrees with 
itself, and with the essential parts of this experience : 
it deserves credit in proportion to the energy of belief 
by which it is then animated. 

^ Siris,' Berkeley used to say, cost him more meditative 
thought and studious reading than any of his other 



A Curious Chain, 19i 

books. This does not surprise one who examines its 
contents. It contains much that has been gathered on 
remote by-ways of past philosophy, as well as on the 
main tracks. A growing inclination towards Platonism, 
in its Neoplatonic mystical form, and an affectionate 
sympathy with Greek ways of thinking, are manifest 
on almost every page. The physical hypothesis of the 
universal efficacy of tar-water, encouraged by daily com- 
panionship with Plato and the ^N^eoplatonists, led him, 
by subtle transitions, from the vital essence of plants 
and animals to the vital spirit of the universe; from 
that to the necessary dependence of all merely pheno- 
menal causation on what transcends nature ; and at last 
to the intuition of the whole phenomenal world, organic 
as well as inorganic, as realisable for reason only in and 
through Spirit. The outcome of ' Siris ' is a struggle to 
apprehend supreme Intellect or Spirit, as the ground 
of that intelligibility of the phenomenal things of sense 
which had engaged the eager argumentative activity 
of the youth in Trinity College. This mental struggle 
finds expression in the curious " chain " of aphorisms, 
about the interpretability of sensuous phenomena; about 
the dependence of space and time upon the contents 
of an experience which must be placed and dated, in 
order to a rational construction of its meaning; about 
the essential unreasonableness of a universe gTounded 
in unintelligent fate; about the impossibility of satis- 
fying the philosophising reason otherwise than by 
acknowledging, in one form or other, free rational 
Will, as the external, or at least the immanent, cause 
of all; and about the inexplicable mystery of triune 
Deity. Whether the Mind thus supreme is " abstracted 



192 Berkeley, 

from the external world, and to be considered by itself, 
as distinct from and presiding over the created system ; " 
or whether "the whole universe, including mind to- 
gether with the mundane body, is conceived to be God, 
and the creatures to be partial manifestations of the 
divine essence " — there is "no atheism," he is ready to 
grant, " in either case, whatever misconceptions there 
may be — so long as Mind or Intellect is understood to 
preside over, govern, and conduct the whole frame of 
things." In either way we have, within the transitory 
things of sense, a natural order that is steady, and a 
higher government going on, with a moral purpose that 
is absolute. This Eternal Fact, however it may be ex- 
pressed in thought, is what is meant by God. 

The change of the point of view in ' Siris ' is from 
negation to construction. Instead of the argumentative 
unsubstantiation of phenomenal things, we have now 
Spirit as the foundation and practical realisation of aU. 
This change was accompanied by a significant verbal 
change. What in the ' Treatise on Human Ejiowledge ' 
are called " ideas " are in ' Siris ' called " phenomena." 
" Idea," on the other hand, is used in ' Siris ' almost 
always in its Platonic meaning. The early phenomenal- 
istic JNTominalism — expressed by the use of " idea " in a 
meaning that is strange to us — -is here transformed into 
a Platonic Realism, in which Berkeley often appears as 
if struggling to reach a knowledge that is empty, because 
the help of the sensuous imagination has been with- 
drawn. The Ideas of ' Siris ' are not like the " ideas " 
of Locke ; nor yet like Berkeley's own " ideas of sense," 
whose esse is jpercipi — " inert, inactive objects of per- 
ception." They are " self-existent, necessary, active prin- 



Ideas and ideas. 193 

ciples." N'eitlier are they the " abstract ideas " against 
which he argued so vehemently at Trinity College and 
long after. As "abstract," these were not phenomena 
of sense or imagination ; and yet as Lockian ideas 
they were phenomena. The inconsistency of a pheno- 
menal representation of universality Eerkeley was then 
fond of exposing. But the " Ideas " of * Siris ' are very 
different. They are " most real beings, intellectual and 
unchangeable ; and therefore more real than the fleeting, 
transient objects of sense, which, wanting stability, can- 
not be objects of science, much less of intellectual know- 
ledge." The most refined human intellect, exerted to its 
utmost reach, can only seize " some imperfect glimpses " 
of the Ideas now dawning upon him, obscured as they 
are in this mortal life of sense by things corporeal and 
imaginable. 

The text on which the metaphysical part of 'Siris' 
is a commentary, is the principle — assumed to be self- 
evident — that law and system in nature must itself be 
caused — must be the manifestation of eternally active 
Universal Mind. The occasion for commenting on this 
text was a supposed biological law, according to which 
the vital element contained in tar is the " cause " of 
healthy life in a diseased animal organism into which 
it is introduced in combination with water. This, if 
really a law of nature, would be an example of the 
merely phenomenal causation with which alone biology 
can be concerned. All the laws in nature are examples 
of this sort of causation. It makes what we call ]^ature. 
The philosophical question which lies behind this is, 
Whether people are rightly said to find causality at all 

p. — IIL N 



194 Berkeley, 

in the merely phenomenal conditions that are thus 
called causes ? These, no doubt, it is the prime office 
of students of physical and biological science to ascer- 
tain; in so doing they interpret nature, as nature now 
exists, charged with its great unfulfilled prophecies. Is 
the discovery of these prophecies, however, the discovery 
of what is ultimately involved in causation and power 1 
Can we properly be said to have satisfied the search for 
cause, when we have only found that the phenomena of 
sense, or the conscious states and acts, about whose 
origin we are curious, issue as natural sequences from 
certain antecedent phenomena in inorganic or organic 
bodies ? 

The often-repeated answer to this question given in 
* Siris ' is, that we can in no instance whatever say that 
"cause" has been found when only phenomenal con- 
ditions, organic or otherwise, have been found. The 
phenomenal antecedent is itself, in every case, an effect. 
Each phenomenal " cause " is itself only a caused, and 
therefore not the real, cause ; for it presupposes pheno- 
menal antecedents or conditions, without which it could 
not itself exist; and these in turn presuppose still 
ulterior phenomenal antecedents, as their conditions, 
without which they could not be manifested; and so 
on, in an endless regress. But the greatest of all 
effects is that the whole phenomenal world is in fact 
thus connected as the system of interpretable signs we 
call Nature. If it were not so connected it would 
not be a world ; there could be no such thing as 
experience ; at least the experience would be insane, 
unintelligible, chaotic. Everything then would be in- 
dependent of everything else; indeed there could be 



The infinite regress of Science. 195 

no phenomenal thing at alJ, for each phenomenon 
would be independent of every other, isolated, and 
therefore incapable of making a part of a real thing. 
The " world," after the withdrawal of phenomenal con- 
catenation, would at once dissolve, and its present reality 
would disappear in unintelligible impressions. — Still, the 
web of phenomenal connection that is presupposed in 
science, and in ordinary experience too, does not com- 
prehend within it, according to Berkeley, the unpheno- 
menal cause which we are in quest of, when we seek 
philosophically for the rational meaning of events. 
Eeal power cannot be found among phenomena, nor in 
phenomenal organisms. Events in sense no doubt send 
us in quest of it. But the established rules which the 
things of sense and their events obey, instead of satisfy- 
ing us in this quest, are only so much added to the sum 
of the facts that demand explanation. The true seat of 
power and causality is within the veil. It is in the 
supersensible or transcendent ; not among phenomena, 
nor in the world of phenomenal experience. Can we 
foUow it within the veil? 

That depends upon the possibility of our having, 
either a sort of knowledge that is unphenomenal, or else 
a faith that transcends both the data of the senses and 
faith in merely physical law. The answer, in short, 
presumes a philosophical theory of human knowledge. 
Berkeley did not attempt what Kant tried afterwards : 
he did not deliberately set himself to settle the boundary 
within which "knowledge" must be confined, in order 
to be real knowledge. Kant did this, and announced 
that on trial he had found the way to all supposed tran- 
scendent reality barred — that there was no scope for the 



196 Berkeley, 

functions of the understanding, in elaborating real know- 
ledge, a single step beyond phenomena and phenomenal 
things. Intellect, according to Kant, has objective val- 
idity only so far as there are aspects of existence pre- 
sented, for it to enter into and convert into real know- 
ledge. Whenever men try to think beyond this boundary, 
thought must collapse ; there can be no reality in the sup- 
posed knowledge got. The causal craving, accordingly, is 
confined within this sphere. We are obliged, as rational 
beings, to assume a phenomenal parent, or caused cause, 
in a chain of natural causation, for each new pheno- 
menal birth; and we are forbidden, with a due regard 
to our own limits, to go outside the sphere of phenome- 
nal or caused causes, in quest of the free or terminating 
cause. If we do so, we are warned that, as we have then 
parted from the matter which gives reality to our concep- 
tions, our judgments must become empty and invalid, 
leaving us without ground for either affirmation or denial. 

Berkeley has no conception of this sort of intellectual 
criticism. In the absence of it, his position is not easy 
to define ; nor the evidence on which he rests in his flight 
in ^ Siris ' into the world beyond sense. He seems to 
say that we have supersensible experience, and to imply 
that he had secured footing within the supersensible 
region, in the common sense conviction of his own 
spiritual existence, with which, like Descartes, he had 
started in his principles of human knowledge. For he had 
steadily maintained that we are conscious of ourselves 
as spirits — conscious, too, of our spiritual individuality 
and continued identity. He had thus found in him- 
self a first, free, and unphenomenal cause. -^ He had 

1 He so guarded himself that Hume's universal scepticism is, no 



" / am a Power '^ 197 

latterly expressed this, by saying that, though we can 
have no "idea" of ourselves as spirits — for a self is not 
a phenomenon — yet we have a " notion " which we con- 
nect with the personal pronouns; we know what "I" 
means, and also what " you '' means. This unphenomenal 
knowledge of spirit, which Kant afterwards repudiated, 
was the bridge over which Berkeley passed, from the 
purely passive world of phenomenal things and pheno- 
menal causes, in which exclusively natural science has its 
home, into the world of free spiritual agency, where alone 
there is rest and satisfaction for the causal tendency. 
He might, perhaps, have agreed now to put it thus : — 
The craving for a cause, which originates in the moral 
consciousness of self, is evoked by the spectacle of pheno- 
menal changes. This obliges us to assume the orderli- 
ness or intelligibility of their coexistence and succession 
in a system of nature. But man cannot find final satis- 
faction in natural order. The search for causes among 
phenomena would be an infinite search ; for each pheno- 
menal cause must be in turn an effect. To explain 
the rationality of the whole spectacle, we must turn 
to reason or spirit, from which we started in common 
consciousness with Descartes. We find in the macro- 
cosm only what we at first found in embryo in the 
microcosm — objective Spirit or Eeason, in which our 

legitimate expansion of the ''Principles of Human Knowledge." 
Berkeley presents himself as an advocate of the common sense or 
common consciousness in two respects. (1.) In his acknowledgment 
of faith — immediate, or at least implied in moral experience — in the 
transcendent reality of individual agency. (2.) In maintaining — also 
as ineradicable faith — that sensible things, as given in the senses, are 
only phenomenal things ; and that we perceive them immediately ^ in 
their phenomenal reality, and do not need to prove this by reasoning. 



198 Berkeley. 

own individual spirit may be said to participate, and 
of which we had experience in the primary act of 
knowledge, when we found anchorage in our own spir- 
itual reality. 

It is through the rational faith in causality that the 
phenomenal things of sense are so concatenated, in sub- 
ordination to Spirit, that there is phenomenal connection 
between the present, the past, and the future. Without 
this connecting principle, which is the essence of reason- 
ableness, not only is natural order at an end, but the 
individual things of sense themselves must dissolve in 
chaos. The particular manner of their constitution, and 
the particular laws according to which they resolve into 
a physical system, are no doubt "arbitrary" — if by this 
is meant, that the constitution might be conceived to 
be different, and the laws other than they actually are. 
But that there should be constitution and law of some 
kind among phenomena is not an arbitrary alternative. 
It is, on the contrary, a necessity that is impKed in 
the fact that Reason or Intellect is at the root of all. 
It is the result of the phenomenal world being, in itself 
and in its constitution and laws, dependent on Spirit. 
There may be no absolute or rational necessity in the 
present phenomenal connections : there is rational neces- 
sity, however, for the existence of phenomenal connec- 
tion of some sort ; for this is involved in the convic- 
tion of the supremacy of Spirit, which is the primitive 
voice of conscious man. The principle of causality, so 
understood, is the universal form of the original fact out 
of which human knowledge arises, which Berkeley thus 
reaffirmed after Descartes, and then universalised. 

Our discoveries of the particular phenomenal connec- 



Nature involves God, 199 

tions of coexistence and succession, which now hold good 
in nature, Eerkeley had, years before, expressly referred to 
sense and its " suggestions." The intellectual obligation 
to refer the phenomenal world and all its actual connec- 
tions to a hyper-phenomenal cause, efficient and final, 
was recognised by him as due to intellect proper, as 
distinguished from the tendency to suggest, produced by 
custom. ^^ To be suggested," he had already said in the 
^Vindication of Visual Language,' "is one thing, and to 
be inferred is another. Things are suggested and per- 
ceived by sense; we make judgments and inferences 
by the understanding. We infer causes (proper) from 
effects, effects from causes (proper), and properties one 
from another, where the connection is necessary." ^ In 
all this there was an approach to the more emphatic 
recognition of reason, as an element presupposed in 
sense, and superior to mere sense, which became trans- 
parent in ^ Siris.' 

Here are some expressions by which in ' Siris ' the 
supersensible realities of intellect and the spiritual world, 
which alone give stability and cohesion to the world of 
nature, are enforced, in what is really an appeal to our 
ultimate philosophical faith : — 

"Though it be supposed the chief business of a natural 
philosopher to trace out causes from their effects, yet this is 
to be understood not of agents, but of component parts in one 
sense, or of laws or rules in another. In strict truth all 
agents are incorporeal, and as such are not properly of phy- 
sical consideration. . . . The mechanical philosopher in- 
quires properly concerning the rules or modes of operation 
alone, and not concerning the cause ; forasmuch as nothing 



1 * Works,' vol. i. p. 389. 



200 Berkeley, 

mechanical is or really can be a cause. ... It passeth 
with many, I know not how, that mechanical principles give 
a clear solution of the phenomena. The Democratic hypo- 
thesis, saith Dr Cudworth, doth more handsomely and intel- 
ligibly solve the phenomena than that of Aristotle or Plato. 
But things rightly considered, perhaps it will not be found 
to solve any phenomena at all. . . . Those principles 
do not solve — if by solving is meant assigning the real, 
either efficient or final cause of appearances, but only reduce 
them to general rules. There is a certain analogy, constancy, 
and uniformity in the phenomena or appearances of nature, 
which are a foundation for general rules : and these rules 
are a grammar for the understanding of nature, or that series 
of effects in the visible world whereby we are enabled to 
foresee what will come to pass in the natural course of 
things. ... As this natural connection of signs with the 
things signified is regular and constant, it forms a sort of 
rational discourse, and is therefore the immediate effect of an 
intelligent cause." 

What may be called biological psychology of course, 
on this view, shares the fate of all other professedly 
philosophical or ultimate, but really scientific and merely 
natural, explanations. The " modes of motion of the 
cerebral substance," of which Professor Huxley speaks,^ 
may be connected, as sign and thing signified', with cor- 
relative states of consciousness. An established con- 
nection of this sort, however, even if it could be verified 
of every conscious act and state through which man 
passes, only constitutes one set of rules in the system 
of effects called nature, as nature goes on under the usual 
phenomenal conditions. It does not carry us a step 
towards the power to which this and every other part of 
nature's phenomenal language is to be referred ; though 
1 See Huxley's * Hume/ pp. 76-82. 



Berkeley and Spinoza. 201 

the latent prophecies with which in this instance our 
organism would be charged might be put to much useful 
account, in the medical management of our bodies. And 
this is so, whether we read the phenomena in terms of 
matter and motion or in terms of sensations. Sensations 
are in themselves as far from proper power or causality 
as motions are. They are as remote as motions them- 
selves from Idealism proper, and from moral or unpheno- 
menal causality. 

Philosophy, with Berkeley, ever turns its eye towards 
the hyper-phenomenal reality. It had been the endeav- 
our of his early life to dispel the supposition of an active 
intervening medium called "matter." But throughout, 
what he really wanted to do was, to show the irration- 
ality of absolute independence of Mind being attributed 
to this supposed active medium. Its present " activity," 
he tried to demonstrate, must be a dependent activity; 
but if all so - called " action " throughout the pheno- 
menal world of sense were acknowledged to be ulti- 
mately the action of Mind or Spirit, he would probably 
have been satisfied with this acknowledgment, as a suffi- 
cient unsubstantiation of matter. 

E'or does he mean that all the action in the universe 
is the action of one Supreme Spirit, which would thus 
become one Supreme Substance, in itself neither Spirit 
nor Matter. Berkeley professed to find other spiritual 
agents besides God. He did not intend to reduce all 
to God and phenomena. On the contrary, unlike Spin- 
oza, he recognised the existence of free agents, finite yet 
responsible, subject to a moral government conducted 
through the medium of the phenomenal order. In 
referring, for instance, to the motion of the heart and 



202 Berkeley, 

other organs of the body — while objecting to the hypo- 
thesis that " unknowing nature " is their cause— he adds 
that " the true inference is, that the self-thinking indi- 
vidual or human person is not the real author of these 
natural motions." Why] Because, "in fact, no man 
blames himself if they are wrong, or values himself if 
they are right." ^ These words make personal respon- 
sibility the test for distinguishing the agency of finite 
spirits from the agency of the Supreme Spirit or Uni- 
versal Mind. 

While Berkeley's eye was thus turned to the super- 
sensible, towards which he was making ready to take 
his intellectual flight, he felt the difficulty of the posi- 
tion, and the impediments in the way of the ascent : — 

" Human souls in this low situation, bordering on mere 
animal life, bear the weight and see through the dusk of 
a gross atmosphere, gathered from wrong judgments daily 
passed, false opinions daily learned, and early habits of an 
older date than either judgment or opinion. Through such 
a medium the sharpest eye cannot see clearly. And if by 
some extraordinary effort the mind should surmount this 
dusky region, and snatch a glimpse of pure light, she is soon 
drawn backwards, and depressed by the heaviness of the 
animal nature to which she is chained. And if again she 
chanceth, amidst the agitations of wild fancies and strong 
affections, to spring upwards, a second relapse speedily suc- 
ceeds into this region of darkness and dreams. Neverthe- 
less, as the mind gathers strength by repeated acts, we should 
not despond, but continue to exert the prime and flower of 
our faculties, still recovering, and reaching on, and strug- 
gling into the upper region, whereby our natural weakness 
and blindness may be in some degree remedied, and a taste 
attained of truth and intellectual life." ^ 



1 'Works,' vol. ii. p. 461. 2 ibid., p. 498. 



Physical and Metaphysical Causality, 203 

'Siris' is the philosophy of Causation, first in its 
scientific or physical, and next in its metaphysical or 
theological phase. ^ The whole book is devoted to this 
correlation and contrast. 

Throughout the former half at least of the book, we 
contemplate phenomena of sense undergoing transfor- 
mation into other phenomena of sense, in a steady suc- 
cession of orderly metamorphoses. This is the language 
of nature, of which positive science is the interpretation. 
The other or spiritual side of existence is then turned 
towards us. We are there made to see as through 
a glass darkly the phenomenal causes, which are not 
real causes but effects of causes, resolving themselves 
into the unity of reason, in unphenomenal cause or 
power; and with this side theology or metaphysics 
has to do. Thus there is the scientific way of looking 
at the universe, in which it is seen to be a system 
of significant, and therefore interpretable, appearances; 
a language that is arbitrary, inasmuch as it might have 
been, or may become, different from what it now is — 
but which, by necessity of reason, must be language 
of some sort; for unless the appearances were also 
trustworthy signs there could be no such thing as ex- 
perience. Then there is the moral or spiritual intui- 
tion and trust. Towards this we are struggling when 
we aspire beyond interpretable phenomena that can be 
placed and dated, and look towards the universal rational 
agency in which they all centre; itself uncaused, and 
therefore causally inexplicable, since for Eeason no 
reason can be given other than itself. The conception 

1 Some might object to this extension of the word *^ cause," but 
.that is a matter of verbal concern. 



204 Berkeley. 

of causality, first applied to the phenomenal universe, 
thus becomes at last the most general expression for 
faith in the reality, transcendent or at least immanent, 
of Eternal Spirit or Eeason. He who supposes all things 
to be ordered rationally or by mind, should not pretend 
to assign any other necessary cause for them.^ The 
rationality of the order is itself sufficient for reason and 
philosophic faith. 

It follows on this interpretation of causality, which 
seems to contain the rudiments of truth, that scientific 
imagination and faith — concerned with coexistence and 
succession among phenomena of sense, and religious 
imagination and faith — concerned with spiritual life and 
moral agency, — must be in harmony, when each works 
within its sphere. The conjectured laws of phenomenal 
evolution, and of endless integrations and disintegra- 
tions of the phenomenal universe, or indeed any sup- 
posed laws in nature (if verified), are as little at vari- 
ance with a theological conception of things as the 
law of gravitation. Yet an eye for merely physical 
causation deadens insight, in sincere lovers of truth, 
for the facts and necessary conditions of our moral 
experience, which transcend phenomenal science ; in the 
same way as, at an opposite extreme, the one-sided 
religious faith of other lovers of truth repudiates, as 
atheistic materialism, the uniformity of physical law, 
and the phenomenal dependence of consciousness in man 
upon correlative functions of the human organism. 

The contrast and correlation of Sense and Intellect 
is another way of expressing the double aspect of causa- 
tion ; and the train of thought in ' Siris ' often assumes 

^ ^ Siris ^—passim. 



Sense and Intellect, 205 

this form. Some pregnant expressions are used when 
it does so. Here is one which, in anticipation of Kant, 
implies that even science and common experience in- 
volve uniting reason : — 

" Strictly the sense knows nothing. We perceive indeed 
sounds by hearing, and characters by sight. But we are not 
therefore said to understand them. After the same manner, 
the phenomena of nature are alike visible to all ; but all have 
not alike learned the connection of natural things, or un- 
derstand what they signify, or know how to vaticinate by 
them." ^ 

Again : — 

" Sense and experience acquaint us with [i.e., accustom us 
to] the course and analogy of appearances or natural effects. 
Thought, reason, intellect introduce us into the knowledge 
of their causes. Sensible appearances, though of a flowing, 
unstable, and uncertain nature, yet having first occupied the 
mind, they do, by an easy prevention, render the after-task 
of thought more difficult ; and as they amuse the eyes and 
ears, and are more suited to vulgar uses and the mechanic 
arts of life, they easily obtain a preference, in the opinion of 
most men, to those superior principles, which are the later 
growth of the human mind arrived to maturity and perfec- 
tion ; but, not affecting the corporeal sense, are thought to be 
so far deficient in point of solidity and reality — sensible and 
real, to common apprehensions, being the same thing. Al- 
though it be certain that the principles of science are neither 
objects of sense nor imagination; and that intellect and reason 
are alone the sure guides to truth." ^ 

The immanence in sense of supreme reason or in- 
tellect seems almost involved in some turns of ex- 
pression in * Siris.' Nature is " reason immersed in 

1 • Works.' vol. ii. p. 460. 2 i^id., p. 464. 



206 Berkeley, 

matter ; " philosopliy is the endeavour fully to disengage 
the immanent reason. Existence is reason entering into 
sense. Without its presence sense is unintelligible 3 
without phenomena of some sort reason is only latent. 
The thought, when it takes this form, struggles for 
adequate expression : — 

" Comprehending God and the creatures in one general 
notion, we may say that all things together make one uni- 
verse, or TO TTOLV, But if we should say that all things make 
one God; — this would indeed be an erroneous notion of God, 
but would not amount to atheism, as long as miud or intel- 
lect was admitted to be to rjyefiovLKov, the governing part. It 
is, nevertheless, more respectful, and consequently the truer 
notion of God, to suppose Him neither made up of parts, 
nor to be Himself a part of any whole whatever. All 
those who conceived the universe to be an animal, must, in 
consequence of that notion, suppose all things to be One. 
But to conceive God to be the sentient soul of an animal is 
altogether unworthy and absurd. There is no sense nor 
sensory, nor anything like a sense or sensory, in God. Sense 
implies an impression from some other being, and denotes a 
dependence in the soul which hath it. Sense is a passion : 
and passions imply imperfection. God knoweth all things 
as pure mind or intellect ; but nothing by sense, nor in nor 
through a sensory." ^ 

It is not so with intellect or reason in man. " We 
are embodied." Intellect in us is at present conditioned 
by the phenomenal things we call our bodies. In pass- 
ages in * Siris,' there is a transition from contemplation 
of pure Intellect or God to contemplation of intellect 
as finite men share in it, which reminds the reader of 
sentences in Pascal : — 

1 'Works,' vol. ii. p. 476. 



Innate ideas and innate Ideas, 207 

" Man is a compound of contrarieties, whicli breed a rest- 
less struggle in his nature, between flesh and spirit, the beast 
and the angel, earth and heaven, ever weighed down and 
ever bearing up. ... It is the same in regard to our fac- 
ulties. Sense at first besets and overbears the mind. The 
sensible appearances are all in all : our reasonings are em- 
ployed about them : our desires terminate in them : we look 
no further for realities or causes ; — till intellect begins to 
dawn, and cast a ray on this shadowy scene. We then per- 
ceive the true principle of unity, identity, and existence. 
Those things that before seemed to constitute the whole of 
Being, upon taking an intellectual view of things, prove to 
be but fleeting phantoms." ^ 

As men rise from the life of sense towards the 
reason that is found to shine in and through sense, 
they approach that union with God which is the chief 
end of man. Berkeley finds this Divine or Universal 
Eeason at the root of our personal being or spiritual 
individuality — as he ascends on the chain in w^hich 
"each lower faculty in us is a step that leads to one 
above it,'' — the uppermost bringing us to God, who is 
Reason. There is that in us, he insists, which is not 
given by sense ; though it is in us only in a latent state, 
till it is awakened by reflection, so that " this sort of 
learning seemeth in effect reminiscence." Ideas are not 
innate, if an idea means a phenomenon ; but the rational 
constitution of things is innate in that intellect which 
we share with God. Here is a pregnant passage in this 
connection : — 

" Aristotle held that the mind of man was a tabula rasa, 
and that there were no innate ideas. Plato, on the contrary, 



1 * Works,' vol. ii. p. 478. 



208 Berkeley, 

held original ideas in the mind ; — -i.e., notions which never were 
or can be in the sense. . . . Some perhaps may think the 
truth to be this : — that there are properly no ideas [i.e., phe- 
nomena], or passive objects, in the mind but what were de- 
rived from sense ; but that there are also besides these her 
own acts or operations. . . . This notion seemeth somewhat 
different from that of innate ideas, as understood by those 
moderns [e.g., Locke] who have attempted to explode them."^ 

The account given in ' Siris ' of what psychologists 
call " faculties " of cognition in man is in harmony with 
all this : — 

" The perceptions of sense are gross. . . . By experi- 
ments of sense we become acquainted with the lower faculties 
of the soul ; and from them, whether by a gradual evolution 
or ascent, we arrive at the highest. Sense supplies images to 
memory. These become subjects for fancy to work upon. 
Eeason considers and judges of the imaginations. And these 
acts of reason become new objects of the understanding. In 
this scale each lower faculty is a step that leads to one above 
it. And the uppermost naturally leads to the Deity ; which 
is rather the object of intellectual knowledge than even of 
the discursive faculty, not to mention the sensitive." ^ 

Some of the most beautiful expressions in ' Siris ' are 
those whicji describe the " restlessness " of the finite 
mind of man, when — becoming obscurely conscious of 
participation in the nniversalising intellect — he strives 
to shake off the slumber in which he is, through sense, 
disposed to remain, so as to " recover the lost region 
of light," but in which a " perfect intuition " of the 
supreme intellectual order is granted to be unattainable. 

'Siris' so much magnifies causation aiid philosophy 
1 ' Works,' vol. ii. pp. 484, 485. 2 ibid., p. 482. 



Phenomenal Space and Time. 209 

on the transcendent side, that the phenomenal ahnost 
disappears. The light of the Universal Mind shines so 
"brightly, that there is less need for nnsubstantiating 
and reducing to impotence the " active medium '' called 
Matter, by which it had been obscured. N^ow and 
then, however, Berkeley's thoughts return to the old 
groove, as he finds support for them in the insight of 
earlier thinkers. Thus he brings Aristotle as well as 
Plato to defend the proposition that " actual knowledge 
and the thing known are all one " — otherwise expressed 
by Parmenides, when he taught that "to understand 
and to be are the same thing." Again, — "As to an 
absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal things, 
it doth not seem to have been admitted either by Plato 
or Aristotle." And if passages are found in Aristotle 
which appear to imply that the phenomenal objects of 
sense exist independently of mind, he reminds us that 
Aristotle distinguishes "a twofold existence — potential 
and actual. It will not, therefore, follow that, because 
a thing is, it must actually exist. "^ There is a po- 
tential existence which things have, distinct from their 
actual or intelligible existence, as significant pheno- 
mena interpreted by us. Por they exist in Supreme 
Intellect and "WiU; and this unphenomenal existence 
is only potential, relatively to individual human 
minds. 

The relative and dependent, because phenomenal, 
character of Space is as favourite a thought as ever in 
*Siris,' but less is said about the phenomenal and 
created existence of Time. " !N'atural phenomena " are 

^ ' Works/ vol. ii. p. 486. 
P. — III. O 



210 Berkeley. 

pronounced to be " only natural appearances. They are 
therefore such as we see and perceive them. Their real 
and objective ^ natures are therefore the same — passive 
without anything active, fluent and changing without 
anything permanent in them." Yet " they are not only 
first considered by all men, but most considered by most 
men. They and the phantoms that result from those 
appearances — the children of imagination grafted upon 
sense — such, for example, as pure space — are thought 
by many the very first in existence and stability, — and 
to embrace and comprehend all other beings." ^ When 
Berkeley, as here, uses the word " space," he does not 
mean a huge entity that has an actual existence inde- 
pendently of phenomena and conscious spirit, within 
which God and the universe are contained. Space with 
him, so far as it has a positive meaning, is the coexistence 
of actual sense impressions, or of potential ones measured 
by successions of sensations; negatively, it is the ab- 
sence of sense impressions. Time is change in the 
states and acts of which we are conscious ; negatively, 
it is the absence of such changes. 

After all, perhaps this is only a paradoxical way of 
expressing what has been felt, and expressed in other 
ways, by deep thinkers from Plato to Kant. According 
to Kant, time and space relations have no ontological 
reality. They are only necessary preconditions of our 
becoming conscious of phenomena as objects. Berke- 
ley does not say this; for, instead of their necessity, 
he dwells upon their arbitrariness, their being the issue 
of creative will rather than necessary involvements of 

1 *' Objective " — i.e., phenomenal or apparent. 

2 ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 477. 



Lost in Boundlessness and Endlessness, 211 

finite experience. But with Eerkeley, as with Kant, 
space and time are yirtually relations among phenom- 
ena, or mental fimctions limited by the horizon of the 
phenomenal world. They are not boundless external 
entities; individual experience is their limit in the 
actual; and neither an actual nor a potential infinity 
can be predicated of them ontologically. 

Berkeley and Kant, each in his own way, thus far 
close those sublime avenues towards the Infinite that 
seemed to open, in our convictions of the Boundlessness, 
as a matter of fact, by which our bodies are surrounded, 
and of the Endlessness, as a matter of fact, within 
which our mortal lives are contained. A sense of these 
was a powerful incitement to the metaphysical imagi- 
nation of Pascal, for instance, and it has been a means 
of rousing dormant reflection on the ultimate meaning 
of things, in many minds inferior to his. Men feel the 
fascination of their little spots in space, and their infin- 
itesimal periods in time, being actually parts of what, 
as boundless, becomes unimaginable in one relation ; 
as infinitely divisible, unimaginable in another. It is 
thus that thought has found exercise for itself, in vainly 
applying the category of quantity to the Infinite. The 
" space " about which we speak — whose finite place 
relations man practically understands; and the time 
about which we speak — whose dates and other finite 
relations man can also understand — we find, when we 
try, that we are intellectually obliged to lose, the one 
in a Boundlessness that is inconsistent with the very 
imagination of place, and the other in an Endlessness 
that transcends all dates. 

Yet Berkeley's ways of thinking on this subject and 



212 Berkeley. 

also Kant's, lead us by other routes than the common 
one to a similar goal. All alike seem to carry thought 
towards a point at which place and date, space and 
time, as quantities, are withdrawn from God or Supreme 
Intellect ; and also from reality at the Divine point of 
view. They are all different ways of asserting that these 
perceptions belong to a lower sphere, and that they 
awaken the sense of sublimity from their very impotence. 
They are ways of showing that God is not within the 
space which loses itself in Boundlessness, nor within the 
time which loses itself in Endlessness. This is just 
to say that for God, or in the Perfect Thought, place 
disappears, and past, present, and future times are 
nothing ; or, otherwise, it is to say that space and time 
are only modes of representation for finite conscious 
beings, which have no account when things are viewed, 
as man cannot view them, suh specie ceternitatis. Men • 
image things according to their finitude, but not as 
they are in themselves. For God or Supreme In- 
tellect, things exist neither placed nor dated ; but how 
they so exist we cannot tell, unless we can pass in imagi- 
nation beyond quantitative space into Boundlessness, 
and beyond periods of time into Endlessness. Are not 
space and time thus constant evidence that man can- 
not mentally realise existence according to the Divine 
Thought — that our placing and dating intelligence must 
be inadequate to the placeless and dateless Intellect 1 



213 



CHAPTEE IV. 

SCEPTICISM — AGNOSTICISM — GNOSTICISM — FAITH. 

Some years before the death, of Berkeley, his immaterial- 
ism, and the assault on metaphysical abstractions with 
which it was connected, were spoken of eulogistically in 
two works, which attracted little attention on their first 
appearance ; although they gave rise afterwards to the 
chief revolution that has occurred in the methods and 
conceptions of modern philosophy, since its birth in the 
writings of Descartes. David Hume's ^ Treatise of 
Human ]N"ature ' was published in 1739 ; his ' Inquiry 
Concerning Human Understanding ' followed in 1748. 
In these books the influence of Berkeley's peculiar way 
of thinking, upon a philosophic mind of extraordinary 
power, was for the first time distinctly perceptible. That 
influence had previously appeared only in the forgotten 
criticisms of men not strong enough to affect the main 
current of European philosophical opinion. 

It is curious that although when Berkeley died the 

' Treatise of Human Mature ' had been before the world 

for fourteen years, and the ' Inquiry ' for four years, and 

though both, along with allusions to Berkeley,^ were 

1 For instance, in tlie ^ Treatise of Human Nature ' (B. I. Pt. i. 



214 Berkeley. 

full of discussions which went to the root of materialism 
and the theory of causation, yet no allusion to Himie is 
found in any of Berkeley's writings. There is indeed 
no evidence that Hume was known to him even by 
name. On the other hand, the important statements 
about Berkeley made by the Scotch philosopher refer 
only to his early writings. The 'Essay on Vision,' 
the fragment on ' Human Knowledge,' and the * Three 
Dialogues,' were obviously familiar to the author of 
the ' Treatise of Human JS'ature.' It does not appear 
that he had heard of ' Siris.' At any rate, if he had, 
it was probably on account of its tar-water nostrum; not 

sect. 7), where he pronounces the phenomenalist nominalism of 
Berkeley '^ one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has 
been made of late years in the republic of letters." In the ' In- 
quiry ' (vol. ii., Note N) he observes that most of the writings of Ber- 
keley ^^form the best lessons in scepticism which are to be found 
among the ancient and modern philosophers, Bayle not excepted." 
In thus transforming Berkeley into an unconscious sceptic, Hume 
ignores the Berkeleyan appeal to common sense on behalf of the beliefs 
(a) that the interpretable phenomena of sense, viewed objectively, 
are the real things ; and (5) that in his moral consciousness of him- 
self, as a free self-acting spiritual person, each of us reaches the 
ontological reality of substance and cause, and the spiritual basis of 
things — the datum universalised in 'Siris.' Sense phenomenalism is 
only the introduction to Berkeley's spiritual philosophy. If it were 
the whole of it, he might be classed with the agnostics, or even the 
sceptics. And with reference to identity and causal connection, Hume 
himself confessed, in a passage already referred to, that "the diflB- 
culty was too hard" for his understanding. "I pretend not, how- 
ever, to pronounce it absolutely insuperable. Others perhaps, or 
myself, upon more mature reflections, may discover some hypothesis 
that will reconcile those contradictions." — (Appendix to vol. iii. p. 
305 of 'Treatise of Human Nature.' Compare this with vol. i. pp. 
436-457.) It is difficult to determine to what extent Hume meant 
in the end to allow "faith" to be read into his professed scepticism. 
(J. S. Mill was arrested by a like difficulty in the way of pan-pheno- 
menalism, and the reduction of Mind to "a series of feelings." See 
his * Examination of Hamilton,' pp. 241, 242, third ed.) 



Next great Intellectual Movement. 215 

certainly as the repository of principles which subordin- 
ate to themselves the phenomenalist immaterialism prom- 
inent in the little volumes that emanated from Trinity 
College in Dublin. 

Still Hume must be regarded as immediately following 
Berkeley in the philosophical succession of European 
thought. The next great intellectual move was made 
by him. It consisted in an expansion or exaggeration 
of the one part of his predecessor's theory, which Himie 
had come to regard as the whole. Hume was also Ber- 
keley's only immediate successor in subtle genius and 
intrepid philosophical analysis. In the two books al- 
ready named, he pursued, with kindred ingenuity and 
acuteness, to extreme negative and sceptical issues, the 
war against metaphysical abstractions in sense, on which 
Berkeley had entered with the ardour of youth, as the 
means of clearing the way to a vision of the super- 
sensible. Berkeley's assault upon abstractions, with his 
destructive criticism of mathematical quantity, and of an 
independent material world, had probably more than 
anything else to do with the intellectual awakening of 
Hume, and with the direction taken by his thoughts. 
Hume in his tiu-n set modern thought on the lines on 
which w^e find it at the present day. This has hap- 
pened, partly through the discipleship of those now 
called Positivists or Agnostics, who have possessed them- 
selves of his heritage ; partly, however, through the 
antagonist reconstructive activity which his sceptical 
dissolution of knowledge aroused. And the antagon- 
ism has worked either in the name of common sense or 
the ineradicable beliefs of mankind, as in Eeid; or in 
the name of speculative and practical reason — of what 



216 Berkeley, 

is necessary to our thought and to our moral agency, 
as in Kant. 

Berkeley's latest phase of thought, given in ' Siris,' 
and Hume's publication of his sceptical disintegration of 
all knowledge, both fall within the third or Cloyne period 
of Berkeley's life ; but the work of each, in this period of 
their lives, remained unaffected by and unaffecting the 
work of the other. Yet the ' Treatise of Human ^Nature ' 
and ' Siris,' both in their way works of genius, were 
significant facts in the historical sequel. Berkeley, 
Hume, Eeid, and Kant, are four representative names in 
the philosophy of the eighteenth century. They are con- 
nected in rational as well as in chronological succession. 
The three last had reached middle life when Berkeley 
died. Hume, indeed, had then ended his course as a 
speculative philosopher ; but Eeid and Kant were only 
beginning to publish their thoughts. The three names 
were all unknown to Berkeley when he so suddenly 
passed away at Oxford. 

About that time other names of historic importance, 
representative men too, were becoming known. That 
of Hartley became in due time famous by the ' Observa- 
tions on Man,' which appeared in 1749, in which the 
laws of mental association were offered as the only and 
sufficient solvent of human knowledge and mental life. 
Hartley's representative place has been commemorated by 
Coleridge, in one of the most remarkable chapters of the 
' Biographia Literaria.' Almost contemporaneously with 
the ^ Observations on Man,' Condillac's ^ Essai sur I'Ori- 
gine des Connaissances Humaines ' laid the foundation 
of French empiricism, in a caricature of Locke. Francis 
Hutcheson, too, the countryman of Berkeley and the 



I 



Berkeley the Prelude of three Systems, 217 

pioneer of Eeid, had magnified common sense or inerad- 
icable faith, in works published before Berkeley em- 
barked for America, and his death took place only three 
years after the appearance of ^Siris/ But Hartley, 
Condillac, and Hutcheson, seem to have been all outside 
the life that was wearing away at Cloyne, and that 
ended at Oxford. 

In Berkeley's mental history, revealed as a whole 
in the wiitmgs of its three stages, one seems to hear a 
sort of prelude or rehearsal of each of the three acts in 
which European philosophy has since presented itself. 
The subtle argumentative analysis and negative pheno- 
menalism, so prominent in the Trinity College treatises, 
was the Berkeley to whom Hume and afterwards John 
Stuart Mill avowed allegiance. The appeals to the com- 
mon faith or common sense, in our consciousness of 
self, and in connection with the favourite thought of 
significant and interpretable sense phenomena, of all 
which 'Alciphron' and the 'Vindication' are so full, 
forecast Eeid, while they recall the cogito of Descartes. 
Lastly, the philosophical rationalism of 'Siris,' which sees 
in the phenomenal things of sense the creative working 
of that intellectus ipse in which each separate conscious 
spirit shares, in its way anticipates Kant and Hegel. 
What corresponds to the association and evolution phi- 
losophy — in his phenomenalism; to the philosophy of 
common sense — in his appeals to common convictions ; 
and to transcendental philosophy — in the recognition of 
universal constitutive reason, — may all, I think, be found 
in Berkeley — although he himself had only an obscure 
consciousness of this. 



218 Berkeley, 

The reaction that followed Hume's revolutionary specu- 
lations disengaged the three elements that were thus 
latent in Berkeley. The first disengaged itself in Eng- 
lish and French association psychology, and latterly in 
agnostic Positivism. The second appeared in the " vigor- 
ous protest " on behalf of common sense or the natural 
action of our intellectual and moral faculties, so charac- 
teristic of Eeid and the Scotch psychologists usually 
classed with him. The Platonic intellectualism of 'Siris' 
has found its counterpart in the Kantian and neo-Kantian 
philosophies. These three types of philosophy have 
occupied the interval between the revolution of Hume 
and the present age. The first came from the reconstruc- 
tive efforts of Hume himself. The second is the con- 
servative recoil of the moral and practical side of human 
nature. The third seeks to satisfy the utmost demands 
of reason in a perfect manifestation of the reasonableness 
of the universe. Individual thinkers cannot, it is true, 
be summarily placed in cut-and-dry fashion in one or 
other of these three places. Their more characteristic 
features may be those of the first, or of the second, or 
of the third variety, but then these may be blended 
with other features which belong more to the other two 
types. 

Although these three kinds of philosophy may be 
traced in germ in the thought of Berkeley — when looked 
at all round — the connection between his thought, and 
the subsequent development of either the common sense 
or the gnostic kind, was coincidence more than conscious 
succession. Hume alone was distinctly conscious of the 
Berkeleyan influence. He read phenomenal scepticism 
between the lines in the ' Treatise on Human Know- 



Scepticism and Beid's ''ideas!' 219 

ledge/ He interpreted all existence in this light ; and 
so, in his hands, the material world and all else along 
with it melt into phenomena capriciously connected 
in coexistences and successions. This exclusive atten- 
tion of Hume to one aspect only of Berkeley has pro- 
bably helped more than an^iihing else to the popular 
association of their names as twin patrons of " scep- 
ticism;" and also to Berkeley's being placed beside 
Locke and other supposed "empiricists," who it is 
fancied had not the courage of their opinions, and 
whose unconscious scepticism was logically laid bare in 
the ' Treatise of Human ]N'ature/ 

Hume undid all received knowledge and belief, by 
setting out with the assumption that the common 
theory of the experts of his time was empiricism.. 
At least, he supposes knowledge to depend ultimately on 
impressions or phenomena, and to be in the position of 
needing to argue its way to belief in self and in not- 
self, but without any intellectual presuppositions or first 
principles to enable it to do so. This, under the formula, 
" common theory of ideas," was what Eeid, unconscious- 
ly to himself, was fighting against, in his long battle 
with "ideas," as our only data for reasoning our way 
to reality. For the weakness Eeid attributed to that 
theory lay in its merely phenomenalist character, which 
left phenomena destitute of interpretability, and incap- 
able of being the signs of anything. They could, as such, 
be signs neither of the merely phenomenal material world 
of Berkeley, nor of an unphenomenal world of matter ; 
still less could they symbolise the Ideal world of super- 
sensible realism. Hence it was in the " idea " or mere 
phenomenon — irrelative and unintelligible — that Eeid 



220 Berkeley, 

believed lie found the seed -plant of scepticism and 
agnosticism. This subjective idealism or mere pheno- 
menalism he charged against what he calls the " Car- 
tesian system," which, itself and in its Lockian modifi- 
cation, was supreme in the century that followed the 
death of Descartes.^ Its first advocates, he said, had 
tried, on its data, to vindicate our complex physical and 
moral experience — to prove the existence of matter, 
and even to prove their own existence as conscious 
agents ; but their " proofs " were signal failures. They 
could not but be so, if they had only ideas or pheno- 
mena to start from, and if even the existence of a subject 
of these ideas or phenomena had to be introduced by an 
ergo? Hume's strength, Eeid thought, lay in his insight 
into this weakness of the Cartesian system. 

It is easy to see how knowledge and belief disinte- 
grate in Hume's hands, when he avails himself of this 
interpretation of the "Cartesian system;" or of the 
covert and incoherent empiricism, attributed to Locke, 
but not to Descartes, by more recent and more learned 
critics of the past than Eeid. Ordinary beliefs, as well 
as science and philosophy, can then at once be dissolved 
into impressions or unintelligible phenomena. Hume in- 
sists, with Locke, ia referring all that claims acceptance 
in our knowledge or belief to the test of experience. 
Hume's " experience," however, is only isolated impres- 
sions — transitory unintelligible phenomena,. So what 

1 See Reid's ' Inquiry into the Human Mind, or the Principles of 
Common Sense '(1764) — Introduction and Conchision. 

2 As in the "cogito ergo sum" of Descartes, according to Reid's 
interpretation of it. But compare what is said in Professor Veitch's 
powerfully reasoned '* Introduction" to his Translation of the Me- 
thod and Meditations of Descartes (1879). 



h 



Are " ideas " seeds of Scepticism ? 221 

he really means is, that one has no right to believe 
anything that has no counterpart in some phenomenon 
(Descartes and Locke call it " idea," and he himself calls 
it " impression ") to which one can point as evidence of 
its validity. Our primary data are not " perceived 
things," as Eeid afterwards held they were, but only 
the phenomena, out of which Berkeley taught that the 
things of sense are composed — in virtue, however, of a 
significance and interpretability due according to him to 
the grounding of all in Eeason. By the rigid applica- 
tion of the phenomenal criterion, the spiritual intellec- 
tualism of Berkeley was made by Hume to disappear. 
Except as a transitory phenomenon or feeling, the per- 
sonal pronoun "I" could have no legitimate standing 
with him, because no possible phenomenal meaning. 
Equally meaningless, as Berkeley himseK allowed, are 
" space " and " time," except in their phenomenal mean- 
ing. Then, too, as no phenomena could be per- 
ceived in any of the five senses, or imaged in the 
phantasy, that corresponded to what we were sup- 
posed to intend by " identity," " substance," " cause," or 
" power " — ^these words, and their supposed intellectual 
relations, also disappear in the cloud-land of illusion. 
The transcendent beliefs which are the cement or co- 
hesion of real knowledge, along with the individual 
conscious personality which all belief presupposes, and 
in and through which we are brought into participa- 
tion mth the universe of experience, are one after an- 
other removed — because in their nature unphenomenal. 
In the end we find ourselves, if we follow Hume on 
these lines, committing mental suicide, in the act of 
descending into an abyss where all assertions and all 



222 Berkeley. 

denials are alike uncertain, and indeed all alike incap- 
able of being made, in the complete sceptical suspense of 
intellectual action. Such was the issue of a method 
which refused to recognise as real anything beyond what 
a Berkeleyan might have called the phenomenal side 
of reality, and which proceeded on what Eeid denounces 
under the name of the " ideal system." It ended in the 
disengagement of reality — permanence and cohesion — 
not from the things of sense only, but also from the con- 
scious persons, out of whose powers and capacities the 
things of sense draw their meaning and human interest. 

This was the outcome of the 'Treatise of Human 
Nature.' 

Hume's * Inquiry ' pointed to a way of partial recovery 
of lost belief, in the form of a "sceptical solution of 
sceptical doubts," although Hume still confessed his 
own philosophical inconsistency in believing anything. 
The " sceptical solution " went to work in this way. Re- 
peated companionship of similar phenomena has been 
found, he attests, though he cannot tell why it should 
be so, gradually to fuse companion phenomena together, 
in the intense and complex impressions commonly called 
beliefs. For beliefs seem to him to be only inexplicable 
habits of feeling that inexplicably follow an inexplicable 
custom of companionship among phenomena. Pheno- 
mena thus come to cohere in those clusters or aggregates 
we caU individual things ; and our consciousness corre- 
spondingly becomes a perception of the things. Indivi- 
dual things, so formed by unintelligible associations, are 
found further to be connected among themselves, under 
the laws of coexistence and succession which experi- 
mental science makes knoAvn. 



I 



The Sceptic a Suicide, 223 

In this great fact of arbitrary phenomenal association, 
which Hume employs for the constructive part of his 
philosophy, one can still trace Berkeley. For it recalls 
the habitual " suggestions " of arbitrary coexistences 
and successions — in Berkeley's explanation of how we 
learn to see — in his explanation of our perceptions in 
all the senses — and in his explanation of induction. It 
is just his analysis of perception and induction into 
expectation, and of expectation into habit. But the 
habit was not with Berkeley rooted in unreason. It 
was the unconscious expression of supreme all-pervading 
Mind. Its rationale was the constitution of things 
in "mind," if not expressly in rational thought. He 
considered habit, founded on the custom of experience, 
to be the phenomenal occasion, not the actual constitu- 
tion, of intellectual life ; and also the substitute for intel- 
lectual activity after custom has done its work — the un- 
fatiguing way of preserving intellectual results in indivi- 
dual memories. For habit is itself a phenomenon, and, 
like the phenomena of sense, needs something unphe- 
nomenal to transform its results into rational science. 

A philosophy like Hume's, which insists on keeping 
exclusively to the phenomenal side of reality, fails to 
find even phenomenal things. It can make assertions 
and denials at all only by acts in which it is incon- 
sistent with itself. But, on the other hand, in the 
ordeal thus applied to knowledge and behef, weak 
points are found in current philosophies, and so the 
way is prepared for improvements in the philosophical 
conceptions of the future. Otherwise this scepticism 
is an intellectual amusement which can conduct to 
no results ; for it can neither be proved nor dis- 



224 Berkeley. 

proved logically. " A refutation " of Humist scepticism 
is not possible, except by a previous assumption of 
what, to avoid begging tbe question, has to be proved. 
IN'either Eeid nor Kant can be said to refute Hume. He 
professes, as a " universal sceptic," to show the essential 
absurdity of experience; and he demands evidence of 
the trustworthiness of the very faculty of reason by which 
he pretends to have reached this result — if the sceptic 
can without contradiction be supposed to reach "re- 
sults," either negative or positive. Hume is not refuted, 
on his own ground, by Eeid's vigorous appeal to our 
ineradicable beliefs, as trustworthy; nor by Kant's critical 
analysis of necessities of thought implied in the existence 
of mathematics, and of physical experience. To show, 
by means of suspected faculties, that the " experience " 
which has been charged with illusion, because only phe- 
nomenal, really presupposes more than phenomena, is to 
presume as real what the sceptic asks to be proved real. 
There is always an abstract possibility that our faculties 
may be false ; but if even self -consciousness and memory 
must be vindicated before they can be used, we can never 
get to work at all. 

Yet this scepticism, in itself alike incapable of proof or 
disproof, besides the mental exercise which it afforded, 
was a useful propellent force. It made men of thought 
rethink ultimate beliefs, and criticise anew the essential 
constitution of knowledge. And it is always practi- 
cally refuted, by the imperishable trust which reason 
reposes in its own validity ; so that no human mind can 
permanently surrender to it. 

This has been illustrated in those protests on behalf 
of fundamental faiths of humanity which transcend 



Uses of Universal Scejoticism. 225 

phenomena; and also by those struggles to show the 
essential reasonableness of experience or real knowledge, 
which the history of philosophy records since the days 
of Hume. For Hume's writings have been the direct or 
indirect occasion of the philosophical activity of Europe 
for more than a century. They have obliged physicists 
and moralists and theologians to reconsider their as- 
sumptions, and to trace the roots of knowledge further 
back, if they were to assure themselves, in a rational 
way, that it was rooted at all. 

If phenomena alone are the reason as well as the phy- 
sical causes of all knowledge and behef, can anything at 
all be believed, consistently with this supposition? Mere 
phenomena, as irrelative, must go where Berkeley sent 
the unphenomenal matter that inconsistently claimed to 
be phenomenal They must either mean nothing, or else 
their meaning must be incoherent. Phenomenal things 
could not have become what they are without something, 
in the form of either constitutive faith or constitutive 
thought, that transcends phenomena. Of that faith or 
thought Berkeley was at first only dimly aware, under 
the name of "suggestion" — which was reaUy rational 
habit, unconscious of its own rationality. Going deeper, 
he also acknowledged a common sense or common faith. 
At last, the constitutive principle became in his eyes the 
reason in which we are in communion with the Universal 
Mind. Suggestion or association, common sense, and 
Universal Eeason — all latent in Berkeley, became, as I 
have already said, through Hume's disintegrative influ- 
ence, disengaged, for more critical treatment, and have 
since been made factors in new philosophical formations. 
Let us look at these formations. 

p. IIL P 



226 Berkeley, 

First of all, phenomenal science itself undertook to 
give a philosophic account of itself, without any tran- 
scendental help beyond faith in merely physical causa- 
tion. Accordingly, one of the chief intellectual forma- 
tions, in the interval since Hume, has been what is now 
called Positive or Agnostic Philosophy. In this pan- 
phenomenalism, knowledge is limited to physically pro- 
duced beliefs in coexistences and successions — extended 
by * ■ inferences from particulars to particulars " ^ — all at 
last regarded as an evolution, through habit and asso- 
ciation, individual or inherited. With regard to every- 
thing beyond, this sort of philosophy is professedly 
agnostic. 

Agnosticism must be distinguished from the universal 
scepticism that does not admit either of proof or dis- 
proof. The latter dissolves the cement of all belief, even 
beliefs in relations of coexistence or succession among 
phenomena. The former only alleges that outside the 
coexisting and successive phenomena of sense there is 
nothing to be cemented — that all assertions or denials 
about supposed realities beyond the range of natural 
science are illusions. Agnosticism is Berkeley's sense 
significance and interpretability — isolated from all the 
rest of his teaching — incoherently accepted — and then 
rejected in its Berkeleyan issues. Atheism and Theism 
are, I believe, alike incapable of being proved or dis- 
proved, and are alike foreign to human life, at the point 
of view of merely physical and biological Science. 

This incoherent empiricism was Hume's own way of 
recovery from total suspense of all beliefs and all dis- 

1 The inductive and deductive extension of phenomenal knowledge 
is methodised by J. S. Mill, for instance, in his * Logic' 



Agnosticism, 227 

beliefs.^ It finds expression witli him in the " sceptical 
solution " of " sceptical doubts." ^ This " solution " 
consists in acknowledging the reconstructive tendency 
of custom or association, as the physical cause (Berkeley 
would caU it natural sign) of our beliefs about law in 
nature being what they are. " Wherever the repetition 
of any particular act or operation produces a propensity 
to renew the same act or operation, without being im- 
pelled by any reason or process of the understanding, 
we always say that this propensity is the efi"ect of Cus- 
tom. By employing that word we pretend not to have 
given the ultimate reason of such propensity. We 
only point out a principle of human nature, which is 
universally acknowledged, and which is well known 
by its effects. Perlia;ps ^ve can jpush our inquiries no 
further y 

This " sceptical solution " is the only philosophic 
reasonableness that is recognised in the natural science 
philosophy of the present day, with its far-reaching and 
beautiful conception of Evolution, as in Mr Herbert 
Spencer. But evolution itself, if proved, would be only 
an expression of physical causation — of phenomenal 
significance and interpretability — though it may yet 
turn out to be the most comprehensive of all merely 
phenomenal laws, and the highest expression of the 
sense symbolism, or physical causation, which Berkeley 
has so emphatically contrasted with spiritual and tran- 
scendent causality. 

1 In his 'Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.' "Total 
suspense " was the state in which he was in the ' Treatise of Human 
Nature ' some years before. 

2 ' Inquiry,' sect. v. 



228 Berkeley. 

A second philosophical formation, since Hume's time, 
appears at the opposite extreme to Positivism or Agnos- 
ticism — not without illustrating how curiously extremes 
may approach one another. It has arisen in this way. 
Critical search into experience was initiated by Kant. 
He went in quest of something necessary to thought, 
without which, as an ingredient, phenomena could not 
become intelligible experience. This critical search, 
with an expenditure of speculative genius,-^ has at last 
issued in a Gnosticism which offers — as the truly rea- 
sonable or philosophical conception of the universe of 
things and persons — a single general principle which, in 
its rational consequences, is credited with explaining all 
existence in the perfect unity of the Divine Thought. 
Some anticipatory sounds of like import may be heard 
even in ' Siris.' Eut it first became distinct after the 
Kantian criticism of experience, in justification of the 
categories and of a rational phenomenalism. Fichte's 
dissatisfaction with any professed philosophy that failed 
to attain intellectual unity, confirmed the philosophical 
prejudice of Germany against what Eacon (speaking of 
theology) calls "abruptness," — that is to say, acknow- 
ledgment of an unexplained residuum of mystery, which 
forbids the perfection of philosophical science. " As for 
perfection or completeness in divinity, it is not to be 
sought. In divinity [or philosophy] many things must 
be left abrupt." Yet the Hegelian seems to claim, as 
attainable philosophy, an intuition of the rational artic- 

1 In this country, within the last few years, as in Dr Stirling's 
* Secret of Hegel * (1865), Professor Green's edition of Hume (1874), 
Mr Wallace's ' Logic of Hegel ' (1874), Professor Caird's ' Philosophy 
of Kant ' (1877), Professor Adarason's ' Philosophy of Kant ' (1879), 
and Principal Caird's * Philosophy of Religion' (1880). 



Gnosticism. 229 

ulation of tlie universe of things and persons in the unity 
of the creative thought. This, if really attained, would 
eliminate mystery from our physical and moral experi- 
ence, and convert philosophy into absolute science. If 
it has fulfilled its promise, it has translated all faith 
into rationalised thought. But I cannot find that this 
all-comprehensive system really tallies with the experi- 
ence which it is hound to formulate adequately, and also 
to explain ; or that it has yet got so far as to solve even 
so clamant a difficulty as the existence within the uni- 
verse of immoral agents and moral evil.^ We ask for 
intellectual relief for moral difficulties, and we are offered 
the " organisation of thought." We look for bread and 
we find a stone. 

To be distinguished from, if not intermediate between, 
the Positivists or Agnostics, who are satisfied with the 
*^ sceptical solution " of sceptical doubts, and the Gnos- 
tics, who offer a key to the knowledge of the Infinite — 
there have been and are those, both before and since 
Hume, who, with faith in the absolute reasonableness 
of the universe, have not faith in the possibility of 
either ordinary or philosophic men being able to reach 
and apply the transcendent or divine thought in which 
this reasonableness consists. Leojitimate relief from 



1 The distinction between phenomenal things and acting persons 
— ^between nature and individual moral agency — ^which this Gnosti- 
cism fails, as far as I see, to explain, or even to provide for, is touched, 
for example, in Wordsworth's well-known noonday hymn : — 

** Look up to Heaven ! the industrious Sun 
Already half his race hath run ; 
He cannot halt nor go astray, 
But our immortal Spirits may." 



230 Berkeley, 

scepticism in a rational restoration of belief — wise philo- 
sophy for finite intelligence — is by them sought else- 
where. It is claimed as the result of a surrender to 
certain transcendent " tendencies to believe," often latent 
in individuals, which nevertheless are the common con- 
sciousness or common sense — in short, the Eaith of 
Mankind. This Faith is not made by philosophy, and 
philosophy cannot be filled in without it. Through 
Faith individual human spirits, with their finite share 
in the universal thought of the Supreme Spirit, reach 
their apprehension of Infinity, and also their finite 
practical comprehension of what is phenomenally real. 
It is in this attitude that we have, in preceding chap- 
ters, found Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley; and that we 
might have found Pascal and Buffier, or long afterwards 
their countrymen, Jouffroy, Eoyer Collard, and Cousin. 
A philosophy grounded on Faith was the highest lesson 
of Eeid and his successors, especially Hamilton, in Scot- 
land ; more covertly of Kant, in Germany, in the moral 
solution offered, in his practical reason. In an impres- 
sive form, it was the essence of the teaching of Jacobi. 

Philosophical restoration of what is called Faith, be- 
cause it cannot be expanded into rational unity as an 
imaginable system, has, in most of these instances, been 
prompted more by wise moral reaction against sceptical 
suicide, than by speculative interest in the attainment 
of rational unity. This philosophy does not offer an 
intellectual system of the actual universe — a compre- 
hension of it in the Infinite. On the contrary, it offers 
faiths, verified by much reflection, as the philosophical 
basis and constitution of all philosophical knowledge. It 
sees in philosophers, when they are doing their proper 



I 



Faith and Thought, 231 

work, the intellectual and moral police for protecting men 
against speculations that discredit those impulses to be- 
lieve which are independent of philosophy. It assigns 
to philosophy an office that has been likened to that of 
the spear of Achilles, which healed the wounds given by 
itself. It is the aim of this philosophy to revive by 
reflection dormant faith, physical and spiritual ] and to 
interpret, as far as possible, human tendencies to be- 
lieve, that might be blighted by '' sceptical solutions," 
or that might be sublimated in transcendental claims 
to re-think, from the central point of God, the Divine 
Thought according to which the world of phenomenal 
nature and finite moral agents exist. It condemns, as 
demonstrably irrational, the expectation that any human 
philosophy can deduce this complex, phenomenal and 
unphenomenal, universe, out of a single fundamental 
principle. It distinguishes between the Eternal Intel- 
lect, that sees all in each and each in aU, and the finite 
or faith-constituted knowledge, in which moral agents 
share, in their " broken '' fashion, in Divine Know- 
ledge. Those who look philosophically at things from 
tliis point, are satisfied that they find what is deepest 
and truest, in their relations to reality, not in pure 
thought, but in the faith — reasonable inspiration — 
irresistible impulse to believe — from which, when in a 
normal healthy state, a human being cannot escape. 
They are satisfied that the ideal state of wisdom is not 
to be attained by man in or through his share of know- 
ledge ; and that if " philosophy " must be the purely 
intellectual attainment of the all-comprehensive rational 
unity of phenomenal things and self-conscious spirits, 
as at the Divine point of view, then there can for man 



232 Berkeley, 

be no philosophy. Their philosophy is the rational 
intuition that this must he so — that the sense of its being 
so is the predicament in which man finds himself at 
last, when he applies reason adequately to the ultimate 
question- It is the awakening through reflection of 
elements of common consciousness, which cannot be 
translated into human or imaginable thought under con- 
ditions of time ; and the confession that, for finite intel- 
ligence with a finite experience, timeless or transcendent 
thought about real things and persons must be a highly 
attenuated formalism, which leaves in as much dark- 
ness as before the philosophic questions of chief human 
interest regarding the destiny of conscious spirits. 

I find no reason to doubt that human thought cannot 
be sublimated philosophically into Divine Thought — 
that a human philosophy of what must appear to men 
under relations of time is necessarily " broken " — and 
that it has to be cemented by beliefs which refuse to be 
fully resolved into pure thought, though the reasonable- 
ness of their office may be vindicated. 

The three elements, dimly discernible in Eerkeley, 
disengaged by the scepticism of Hume, which have thus 
given rise to three opposed philosophical formations, each 
of which now struggles for predominance, have severally 
their right to exist, as so far genuine elements involved 
in the attempt to know things and persons philosophi- 
cally. May it not be said of Agnosticism and Gnosticism, 
that each is right in much that it affirms, but wrong in 
something that it denies, and that mutual explanations 
might induce approximation to the Philosophy of Faith ] 
Perhaps the next step in advance may be the realisa- 



I 



Nature and Moral Government. 233 

tion of a better understanding of the mutual relations of 
Agnosticism, Gnosticism, and Faith. Present in a crude 
way in Berkeley — then disengaged by Hume for antag- 
onism with each other — they may, in the next move- 
ment of European and American philosophy, be recon- 
nected, in a better union than Eerkeleyism offers, as the 
issue of what has happened in the interyal. 

Is there nothing, then, to which the philosopher can 
look as eternally fixed? Though man fails to unfold, 
in unbroken intellectual order, the actual divine mani- 
festation in the worlds of nature and spirit, for the 
complete satisfaction of his speculative curiosity, — is 
there not the moral anchorage to which Butler with grave 
and anxious countenance points, when he proclaims the 
supremacy of conscience, and at which Kant hears the 
voice of the a^vful categorical imperative ? Although a 
purely intellectual solution of the mystery of existence, 
in Divine Science of the Infinite, may be unattainable, 
we can still be told by Butler, and, at the end of a more 
subtle com'se of reasoning, by Kant, that we ought to 
live the absolutely good, even while we cannot realise in 
thought the perfect rational unity of the actual universe 
that is revealed to man only under relations of time. 

This, unconsciously to himself, is in a manner wrapped 
up in Berkeley's lifelong philosophic thought. That 
thought becomes, when we pursue it further than he did, 
a sublime intuition of the phenomenal realities of sense, 
inorganic and organic, as established media for the intel- 
lectual education of finite spirits by means of physical 
sciences ; for intercourse between individual moral agents ; 
and for a revelation of the Eternal Spirit, in whom the 

p.— III. Q 



234 Berkeley. 

merely phenomenal things of sense, and moral agents too, 
have their being. It includes the fundamental faith that 
the universe exists for an eternal moral purpose, so that 
our experience in it, with the conditions of thought and 
belief presupposed in the experience, must be practically 
trustvi^orthy and reasonable. According to this concep- 
tion, the Government of Nature, with the physical and 
biological sciences in which it has been partially inter- 
preted, is subordinate and ancillary to Moral Govern- 
ment. The universe consists of persons or conscious 
moral agents, and also of phenomenal things which are 
in a process of constant creation ; and the things seem 
to be made for and regulated by the persons. The one 
of Kant's two great objects of admiration and awe is 
only the minister of the other. The " starry heavens " 
pass away; space, under whose relations phenomenal 
things are presented, becomes lost in the unimaginable 
Infinite of Eoundlessness ; time, which the heavenly 
bodies measure, becomes lost in the unimaginable In- 
finite of Endlessness. But Moral Government and 
moral agents cannot thus be lost or pass away. 



END OF BERKELEY. 



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